Pumarosa 'Lions' Den' by Niall Trask

David Knight - 20th June 2018

This is an outstanding music video for Pumarosa by Niall Trask – and in its way utterly terrifying,

Trask brings us ostensibly an idyllic scene: a man tends an apiary, packed with bees busily at work. But the gloriously heightened black and white photography, with black sky and white trees, creates an otherworldy feel that somehow enables the horror that follows.

It's a beautiful way to chip off another crumb of faith in the goodness of humanity.     

NIALL TRASK:

"The anti-capitalist agenda of the song immediately conjured up nature documentary footage of insects underground and creatures under the sea clambering over one another and ruthlessly cannibalising one another for survival. I wanted to look at the idea of nature versus nurture. A man-made hive of bees being harvested by humans seemed like a good place to start. The extinction of bees would end all of humanity.

"My research told me that there is no apostrophe in bees because they operate as one. The hive is the organism, individual bees are just part of the whole. We took a lot of inspiration from British folk horror short stories and films of the 60’s/70’s and also the Tory Wicker Man of 2017."