Dr Chrispy has dropped a music video for TRANSITORY EVENING (AFRO TRAVEL), the standout track from his recent TRANSITORY EP, featuring Haji Mike.
The video is an eye-popping and surreal journey through the mind and into outer space, taking the sample-heavy and synth-driven dance track to a whole other level. Shot on location in a secret lab in San Francisco and at Sia lake in Cyprus, the video connects the two places through the song’s theme of astral projection and out-of-body experiences, or, as the long time Cypriot reggae master and dub poet Haji Mike likes to call it, “Afro Travel”. In the video we see Dr Chrispy receive a strange signal on the screens of a wall of vintage oscilloscopes (the real life Dr Chrispy is bona fide Aerospace Engineer, having co-founded his own space company, Planet Labs). Before long, the signal is revealed to be coming from Haji Mike, who is manipulating the celestial airwaves with his dub poetry. Realizing he can communicate back to Haji Mike with a beat, Dr Chrispy is suddenly pulled through a wormhole shaped like a giant iris, travelling to the edges of the galaxy and back before he is ultimately trapped in the “other world”, while Haji Mike cooly rocks out on the mic to the sublime beat of the song.
The ambitious music video was conceived of, and created by, Dr Chrispy and Haji Mike themselves, with editing assistance by Sydney, Australia-based Gus O’Brien Cavanough. The video features a blend of on-site camera work shot by a small crew in each location and photorealistic animations depicting the protagonist’s trippy journey deep into space. This music video marks Dr Chrispy’s second time portraying his love of things space in video form. In 2019 he released a painstakingly detailed recreation of NASA’s Voyager spacecraft’s exploration of our solar system, set to his soothing and ambient electro space jazz track, Voyager at the Heliopause, which notably included lyrics encoded in Morse Code. Assisting the production of both videos was Dr Chrispy’s longtime collaborator, Bay Area-based graphic designer Drew Mcgaraghan, who conceived the “iris” and animated it, and who also designed the cover art for the Transitory EP and many of Dr Chrispy’s prior releases.
Released in 2020, the TRANSITORY EP is a collection of short stories, each one a first person narrative from a different speaker. With the stories woven over old school beats and instrumentation, every track features sampled monologues or dialogue with a mixture of live, sampled, and electronic instruments to create a nostalgic feeling that is simultaneously comforting yet unfamiliar. The three different tracks, each with distinct themes, cycle from morning, to afternoon, to evening, mirroring our own self-reflections as we move through our day. We are different people late at night than we are early in the morning; who we really are is TRANSITORY.
DR CHRISPY (aka Dr. Chris Boshuizen) is a music producer, songwriter, and award-winning aerospace engineer dedicated to sharing his love of both music and space exploration. During the day Chris works at Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm DCVC where he supports the next generation of space and deep tech entrepreneurs, while at night he runs a small home studio in San Francisco where he is recording new music.
Haji Mike started DJ’ing music in 1979 and as a musician is known for his hybrid of Jamaican dancehall and Cypriot melodies which he calls “Vraggamuffin,” and he is also a dub poet and DJ, playing weekly on various radio stations around the world.
Watch the music video for Transitory Evening on your favourite platform.
Listen to the Transitory EP here, and read more about the other artists involved.
Follow Haji Mike: https://hajimike.com/
To learn more about the “secret lab” featured in the music video visit Lazy Electrons on Youtube.