FROM WHAT THE NEVER WAS

A new Phoenix digital commission
featuring LIARS

‘From What the Never Was’ is the latest major digital commission from Phoenix Central Park, starring the Australian cult favourites of experimental rock LIARS. This new interstellar horror music video places frontman Angus Andrew, drummer Laurence Pike and guitarist Cameron Deyell on a ship in deep space when things go awry.

Reimagining the futuristic interiors of Phoenix as the innards of a doomed space craft, director Clemens Habicht makes playful nods to the melodrama of classic sci-fi tropes while creating the perfect aesthetic complement to the drama of Andrew's syncopated vocals and hypnotic guitarlines. "Only Liars would entertain and embrace my trepanning fantasies…” writes Habicht.  "Angus and his crew are subjected to the traumas and melodramas of classic sci-fi tropes, brutalised by the sadism of scenes from films I think I was probably way too young to have seen as a kid."

The film was imagined as a prequal to ‘Sekwar’ in which Angus is a worn out castaway somewhere in space and ‘Big Appetite’ where he transcends this mortal coil. For Andrew, 'From What the Never Was’ is intended as a moment of recollection within the narrative of The Apple Drop. "It's a point that our traveller has reached which is far from the starting place, but also right back there in memory. The drum sound was appropriated from an old song called ‘We Fenced Other Gardens with the Bones of Our Own’. In that track, the protagonist is drunk on delusions of grandeur, relishing the power of destruction. Now far removed, that character is weary, remorseful. "

The single appears on Liars' forthcoming album The Apple Drop,  to be released by Mute on 6 August 2021.

Photography by Maclean Stephenson