Fred Macpherson and Cavan McCarthy are the London-via-Birmingham music duo behind the ambient, synth-rock sounds of Low Spirits. The footage for their music video, Geiger (Room One), was shot by Thomas Brett using an animation technique that turns film footage into a three-dimensional, long-exposure photograph made up of a million data points.

“The video was shot during the first weeks of the riots in Hong Kong. Many of the streets I filmed in were unsettlingly empty,” says Brett of the city’s extended protests last year. “The video initially served as a snapshot of a time of transition for a city and its people.”

The track featured in Geiger (Room One) started as a field recording made in the abandoned city of Pripyat in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The recordings were then run through a vocoder to create the instrumental that the lyrics and melody are written to.

Not only were the track and music video inspired by abandoned cities and reinterpreted through computer and audio generation, but Brett’s animated Hong Kong also has the aesthetic appearance of a city mapped out by a Geiger counter.

“As work on the animation progressed, the empty neighborhoods in Hong Kong came to signify a further transition, one that quickly pervaded the world,” continues Brett. “I hope the video expresses even a fragment of our current feeling and that the vacant streets gesture to an isolation that might well bond us all.”