In this lovely and intriguing accompaniment for Hammock’s Tornado Warning, Chicago-based director Ivan Villafuerte documents a momentous scene of urban life; the Chicago fire department effectively turn a city building into a block of ice…

“I had liked Hammock’s music for a while and James Covill at Hungryman in London managed to get me in to shoot their next video,” Ivan explains. “Late last January, a large fire erupted in a vacant warehouse not far from where I live in Chicago. For two days, I filmed the action (in the guise of a photo journalist), as firefighters battled to control the fire that in the process created a thick layer of ice over the brick facade of the building, from as many angles as I could access before being told to leave.

“The scene was, apart from impressive, somewhat melancholic as here was one building of many in a row of long vacant, anonymous, and undisturbed relics of an economically buoyant era, and there it was naked and exposed in the throws of utter destruction by both fire and ice in the dead of winter. It instantly became the centerpiece for my visual accompaniment to Hammock’s soaring track.

“I met Carlos Lowenstein at the Whitehouse Editors here in Chicago who offered key advice regarding the pace and style of the edit and between us we created the struture of the edit. The video was shot with a 5D2 in natural light.”