Tobias Stretch channels the beauty and melancholia of Hauschka’s single “Craco” in his uncanny video filmed in Philadelphia's answer to Brooklyn's High Line, Reading Viaduct Park. With music videos for Radiohead, Crystal Fighters and Christopher Bono to his name, the Philly-based animator is known for his distinct aesthetic and method, pairing landscape photography with life-size stop-motion puppets. “I thought right from the beginning when I saw Tobias’s work that it has a mixture of analog and handmade elements and a surreal atmosphere. In my music you have similar elements,” says Hauschka himself, aka the German pianist and composer Volker Bertelmann, who headline’s London’s Union Chapel tonight as part of his European tour. Although best known as a 21st-Century protagonist of the prepared piano practice championed by John Cage, Bertelmann “left all the preparations at home” in order to work with a pure sound on this track. Named after the Italian ghost town,“Craco” is taken from his entropy-laced album Abandoned City and played to Stretch’s own fascination with urban decay. “The music was there beforehand, but I had a bowl of music and a bowl of names and I tried to pair them up. I think the music sounded not only like an abandoned place but also like a nostalgic place and that’s why I thought it was a great match.”

Your work often features these organic figures. Why is this?
Tobias Stretch: I'm sure my early years in rural Appalachia have the most to do with it. I think now I'm just expressing all those textures and forms I was surrounded by as a kid, and I'm synthesizing them with more artificial and manufactured elements that I've been surrounded by the last 15 years living in a city.

What was it about the Reading Viaduct Project that attracted you for this video?
TS: I knew right away that the area would work for the track. I've always had a direct connection with architecture, building houses with my dad as a kid and being a carpenter until my early 30s. The Viaduct is the nearest location with that level of urban decay that I was looking for.

What are the pros and cons of shooting with stop motion animation?
TS: It is very laborious and time consuming, but compared to other kinds of animation, the characters are more tactile and have a lifelike presence. The art of stop-motion animation is much like life: it's an expression of time captured from a series of miraculous, fleeting moments.

Hauschka plays Union Chapel, London tonight; his European tour finishes on October 5 in Denovali, Germany.