HEXplained... what is the meaning of our new video?

Hey there lovely patron Flock,

It's Friday night. What are you up to this weekend?

The old Mishkin would probably have been drunk by now already, planning my mischievous night out on the town... but today's very sober Mishkin is just about ready for bed, haha how times have changed.

It's not a surprise... I'm working very hard at the moment on numerous music projects, daily practice, teaching but also hitting the gym hard, running and yoga to get in good shape for the new video shoot. 

It's good to be tired from doing the things you love, right?

This next coming month we will be filming the music video for our next single from HEX... it's called ᔕᕼIᖴT, which was the very scary song about hammers that I played last night during the webcast. 

Those of you who missed it, fear not. You can catch up here (look out for the pictures section at 55mins though, my sound dropped out as I was explaining, so that part of the talk might be a little hard to follow!) Also some dodgy camera work, but I aim to fix these little issues for next time. How does April 28th suit you all?

WATCH LIVESTREAM - video premier at 46.42, if you want to skip ahead to it.

Here is a link to watch the video file too, in case you want to have repeated nightmares... it's YouTube release will be April 19th, so please get ready for a sharing-frenzy!

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HEX - Hexplained

So I guess it's about time I told you about the video, what the hell was all that about? Excellent. question, I'm not even sure I understand it myself!

During the pandemic (as you know), things did get a little bit weird for me. I had way too much spare time. On top of many other things, I began to read more and more about magick. I'm not talking about pulling rabbits out of hats but more embarking on a journey of self-discovery which lead me to study several occult books. I felt especially interested in reading Tarot, practicing Witchcraft (or Wicca) and even got as far as the Jewish Kabbalah (which is also strongly connected to the Tarot system). 

As part of this obsession I attended an online course at The University of Glasgow in the history of Demonology, which was fascinating. It blew my mind on how far back ritual magick goes, the belief in demons, and how it is present in every single culture. 

The teacher referenced The Lesser Key of Solomon (or Lemegeton), which is a crazy book full of symbols, sigils and how to conjure demons or angels through rituals. I won't go into it much more than, that, you can google if you like but it has become quite an influential book, with the symbols appearing in several horror films (recently in the terrifying Hereditary).

So. This book was a huge influence on the entire album HEX - as you must've seen by now, each song has a sigil attached to it, a number and an occult theme.

For the music video I ran wild with this idea and that's when we decided to build a HEX gate - a gate full of symbols that demons would appear inside if conjured correctly. Each one of us represented a particular entity from the book, with our own number assigned, role and tarot card.

This was my original drawing, evidently, I'm quite the artist 😉

The featured characters were as follows...

Haagenti – 48 – Queen of Pentacles

Paimon – 9 – Queens of Wands

Andras  – 63 – The Chariot

Beleth – 13 – Knight of Cups

If you look at the symbolism in the music video, you can see imagery from these characters. Can you tell me who is who though?

Further to the demon scene we also had Anna, Hana & myself representing the Wiccan Triple Goddesses "Maiden, Mother and Crone". If you look closely you can see Anna's belly swell up in the river to signify the Mother. 

The end of the video was maybe one of the worst things I've ever had to do, crawl into a giant water butt full of mud and black paint and fully submerge myself - ask Simon, it took DAYS to dig it and we ended up having to do it twice cos the first shoot didn't look right!

The final lyrics of the song are: 

"No gods, No masters, No love, One purpose"

This is the final moments - the dark ritual is complete and there is nothing left but terror, chaos, a living nightmare. What lies on the other side of the gate is absolute despair. The audio glitching at the end is terrifying enough but when you add in the screaming creature from the swamp getting closer and closer (me, haha), then I think we nailed it. 

Birdeatsbaby has always been an outlet for my dark side. And this song/video definitely came from a very dark place. I'm glad it's out in the world now (well, almost) and this particular demon has been exorcised. I look forward to hearing your comments and questions! 

I really hope you enjoyed watching the video during the webcast, to watch again, a full quality version can be viewed here, until it's available to the public on YouTube.

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That was a LOT to digest. I think I'm going to post this month's other tiers in a separate post, so do keep an eye on your inbox tomorrow morning for the Deftones cover, and my photobox.

I want to say THANK YOU, for being here and supporting this mad project. This particular video was huge is so many ways, and it definitely wouldn't have made it without your encouragement. This group is more important to me than ever... and I love sharing my creative process with you all.

Love & Feathers,

Mishkin X