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Mr. Gnome, 'Melted Rainbow'

The music videos by Cleveland's experimental rock group Mr. Gnome are always a spectacle. The duo's memorable 2012 video for "House Of Circles" was an epic production, with grand theatrics and stunning visual effects, while "Vampires" and "Night Of The Crickets" were surreal curiosities that played like miniature feature films.

Now comes a new video from Mr. Gnome, for "Melted Rainbow." While not as epic as some of the band's other work, it's still elaborately staged. Nicole Barille and Sam Meister, the married duo behind Mr. Gnome, say the dark and ornate imagery for "Melted Rainbow" was inspired by the surrealist work of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and H.R. Giger, the artist behind the futuristic designs used in Alien.

"We felt like the song was very mechanical," Barille and Meister told us via email. "Almost music-box-like in its instrumentation, while the vocals gave it an organic feminine feel, and we wanted to portray it visually in that way. So we made a motherly, multi-headed, mechanical-alien goddess that is organic, yet she's embedded into a machine."

All the visuals for "Melted Rainbow" were made by hand, using painted wood cutouts and thick layers of makeup. No CGI. Sam Meister's mother, Barb Meister, who did the design work for Mr. Gnome's "House Of Circles," also helped with this one.

"Melted Rainbow" is the opening song from Mr. Gnome's 2014 album The Heart Of A Dark Star.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Robin Hilton is a producer and co-host of the popular NPR Music show All Songs Considered.