Man and bird become one in Alex Takács's outstanding video for Bicep. 

Takács's promo for Gas - from the Belfast-based electronic duo's forthcoming album SLUG - is loosely inspired by a real-life heist in Brussels, where a gang of thieves stole an elite racing pigeon worth over a million dollars.

The Tiblisi-shot film is set within this obsessive subculture of pigeon breeding, following a group who plot to steal a bio-drone - a living pigeon augmented with implants that allow a human handler to control the bird in flight. After the heist, a young member of the group takes the bird on a joyride, experiencing the city anew through the eyes of one of its most misunderstood and maligned inhabitants.

It's an intriguing narrative, treading between gritty realism and dystopia, where Takács operates with brilliant skill. The visual approach sees cinematic slow-motion beauty punctured by degraded CCTV-like surveillance. These digital distortions become part of the storytelling language, as visual signals get filtered through both avian and human biology.

Takacs is in his element creating this speculative reality born from a real world story - the film also draws on present day experiments in military bio-surveillance. The result is gripping and ultimately transcendant, just as the hypnotic track - featuring Lauren Duffus and SOARR - requires.