A woman in pleather lingerie and a dude in a robot helmet twerk and fling themselves around the middle of South Beach's busy Collins Avenue. It's dark out, and hoards of passersby stare without stopping. Harsh metallic music blasts from a speaker, a man's voice drones, and a second woman crouches, unable to contain her utter boredom.Is this someone's post-apocalyptic acid trip? Probably, but it's also Miamian beat-maker Nuri's latest music video. "Savior" is a head fuck collection of urban visuals set through a kaleidoscopic lens. It's what happens when pretty people live in paradise, stay up 'til 3 a.m. every morning, and harbor a silent and subtle hatred for everything around them. When life hands you first-world aggression, don a spaceship mask and air-hump "normal" society in the face.Behind the ocular onslaught is visual and performative artist Sleeper. He designs and builds cyborg suits, wild installations, and surreal sculptures that address "false realities that we create to cope with experiences sometimes masked, layered, stitched or intangible," which is just a fancy way to say he wants to disrupt this every-day thing you've got going on."They just have zero shame," Nuri says of Sleeper and his lady pals. "They're just 'we're out here doing us,' and that's something that they kind of do on the regular. They're used to just going out like that and causing a scene. To be able to capture that on camera and be able to score their energy was really dope."The image fits the musical vibe. "Savior" is a brooding hymn for the modern antichrist. It's minimal but hard-hitting, a slow-build of textures around a repetitive, emotionally hollow piano. Singer Austin Paul, himself a former church boy turned bad, sings with creepy apathy towards someone's cry for help."Savior" is the lead single from Nuri's Lightning EP. Six tracks of equally laid-back industrial moods, Lightning features vocal performances from many of Nuri's frequent collaborators. He produces beats for Miami's talented rap underground, so it wasn't nothing for Robb Bank$, Indigo Child Rick, and Faery Teeth to hop on their buddy's personal project.A true family affair, Lightning marks the producer's first project with Miami's Space Tapes collective. Headed by the same people behind Wynwood's annual III Points Festival, Nuri says the team took a hands-on role from beginning to end. They kept him on schedule, gave him critical feedback throughout production, and are in fact the wild minds behind the treatment for the "Savior" video.In its final form, Nuri offers Lightning as a musical metaphor for the kinetic potential of Miami's emerging creatives, many of whom he's been careful to include and represent."That's why I called it the Lightning EP," Nuri says. "It's the calm before the storm. It's getting turned on, and shit's about to get real serious."
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