The return of Ashnikko with her "angriest song" also heralds a breathtaking comeback to music videos by Saam Farahmand, creating a clinical pop-horror as deliriously subversive and transgressive as anything he has done before. It’s sick.You Make Me Sick! clocks in at just over two minutes, and in that time Farahmand establishes a scenario worthy of Cronenberg in a slick pop video aesthetic, inviting the viewer into repeated surges of disbelief. What is being piped in tubes between the orifices of Ashnikko and her followers? What is that murky liquid rising up around Ash and her dancers?The artist and director are in perfect harmony in their drive to create art that crosses over the line of good taste, and will generate a good deal of actual disgust, even from those who admire it greatly. It’s a brilliant smashing through into something new and dangerous, an undiluted, confrontational, controversial visualisation of raw pain.“I’ve decided to come back with my angriest, most cathartic song to date,” the singer has said of the new song in an accompanying statement. “My own personal rage room for me to smash my plates.”Saam Farahmand has added: "The video is about discovering toxicity, the purging of toxicity and the defiant audacity of revelry and spectacle within it. I continue to explore the collision between raw, uncomfortable human experience, and the seductive spectacle of pop culture."
David Knight - 13th Feb 2023