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Music

Nerftoss' New Video Finds an Eerie Stillness in Digital Garbage

Drones, abandoned buildings, and a Circuit City polo all figure heavily in the Baltimore experimentalist's clip for "Some Kind of Way."

John Jones is probably best known to the world at large as one-fourth the Baltimore based noise wrecking crew Dope Body, but he's also spent the last couple of years indulging more experimental fascinations. Since 2014, he's used the moniker Nerftoss for a string of asymmetrical and overwhelming electronic releases that feel lovingly cobbled together from digital detritus. Crushed, released in May on NNA Tapes, largely continues in that vein, piecing together noisy electronics and stuttering synths, with fluttering percussions ripped from the history of house music. It's a loving tribute to weird and unwieldy beauty when you're willing to dumpster dive, so to speak.

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The video for "Some Kind of Way" only underscores this fascination with the tech that gets left behind, featuring an old camcorder, a busted up laptop, and a polo shirt emblazoned with the logo of the now-shuttered electronics superstore Circuit City in the opening moments. There's not much plot action from there just a guy bleaching his hair and scootering around abandoned landscapes with CD-rs trailing behind him, but taken as an abstract whole, the clip is kind of funny and kind of lonely—as good a parallel as any for the unique collage of mixed emotions that Jones is able to convey in his work.

Watch the clip here, and check out Crushed below, which is out now on NNA Tapes.