“Mother in Comet” first appeared in a dream, framing ‘teary eyes in the twilight’ of an English countryside. A year later, the melancholic instrumental receives a stunning treatment here that both compliments the previous scene and invents another entirely. Director and longtime Gem Club collaborator BriAnna Olson kindly provided some words:

“Processing meaning is such a personal practice, and Christopher’s music has a way of feeling both deeply personal and profoundly supernal. He can run circles around a single moment the way a thinking mind replays an event trying to process its meaning. He’s extracting and uncovering… it feels beautiful… it feels tragic… it feels private. That’s where this video piece came from… it is an anamnesis, a revelatory moment suspended it time, where it is absolute and ever-changing.”

Christopher Barnes of Gem Club, added:

“When BriAnna sent me her idea for the Mother in Comet video I was reminded of the examination in a doctor’s office where a ray of light is shined into your pupil–a series of lenses flash in front of your eye–in order to observe the reflex off the retina. Or perhaps an earlier memory of being a child, eyes closed and holding a flashlight up to my eyelid. The warmth of the bulb, the bright glare of white light against pink.

The visual sense depends entirely on reflected light. Objects in our environment reflect light which enters our eye, forms an image, and transmits information to our brain for processing. Vision occurs when this image is electrically transmitted to the brain for analysis and response. BriAnna’s work suggests this process for me—as a visual representation of how the eye captures an image, or how our brain translates an image into a memory.”

2014 LP In Roses is available on Hardly Art. And soon the band will perform with Lower Dens in Christopher’s hometown of Portsmouth, NH.