"There’s a strength in this film's stillness," says musician George Barnett, who forms one half of the critically-acclaimed experimental band These New Puritans. "It’s not competing with the attention-deficit-disorder culture of today, it’s going in a totally different direction. This is very much an anti-music video."
"Fire always turns up in our songs somehow. Maybe it’s to do with moments that are seductive and powerful but can also consume you and destroy you," Barnett continues. "Obviously, it’s such a primal theme. The history of fire is really interesting, I find. It was really the first technology for transforming our environment, the whole landscape that we consider ‘natural’ is the result of fires started by humans."
Six is the third collaboration between Australian filmmaker Daniel Askill and These New Puritans, following on from their highly commended music videos "We Want War" and "Fragment Two". Askill created the visuals that would be used in Six before the band approached him—he’d been waiting for the right project to come along.
“I knew this track was the perfect partner to my film,” Askill says. “Six is such a beautiful piece of music and combined with the imagery it creates a visual meditation with open eyes. I think George describes it best when he contemplates themes like ‘nostalgia for the future’, ‘eternity in a moment’, ‘power in stillness’, ‘something modern that resonates with the primal and ancient’... I think we are both drawn to these kinds of polarities and interested in finding ways to explore them in image and sound.”
Six is the last track from Inside the Rose, the hotly-anticipated first album to be released by These New Puritans in six years.