Jachin Mee Shares Surrealist Four-Part Music Video

In September of 2024, Jachin Mee (renowned for his work as a member of rising art folk band Any Young Mechanic, formerly known as Wake In Fright) embarked on a solo endeavour and released a kaleidoscopic single entitled Big Mess. The track was the leading single from his debut solo album Talking To Music About People.

Big Mess lives up to its name - it is a grand patchwork of emotions, tempos, and styles. It is everything. And the accompanying music video, set to be released on January 29, is fittingly grand in scale as well. It exhibits a studied but joyous chaos and clutter - just like the single.

The Big Mess music video features the work of four different directors, each helming a quarter of the screen time: Roxy Brown, Conor Mercury, Sheron Subasinghe, and Sam Wilson. The visual interpretations are variegated, mirroring the polychromatic nature of the song: there are switches from high-definition picture to handheld camcorder footage, switches from surrealism to realism, switches in emotional tone. 

Mee says, “I was really drawn to the idea of having such disparate visual stylings in the one place - Roxy’s bright multimedia collage to begin the video contrasts nicely with Sam’s gritty super 8 to end it. It was also enticing for the same project to involve working with Conor for the first time while simultaneously reconnecting with Sheron who I’d made short films with in high school. I was drawn to how distinct each directors’ aesthetic was and drawn to trying to position myself at the intersection of them all.”

The musician continues, “With the advent of streaming, nobody is constrained by location or genre when it comes to finding the music they love. I wanted to highlight how beautifully interesting the result of having disparate influences can be on pop music, not just across an album, but on a single song. By the same token, growing up exposed to countless areas of artistic output at once can be jarring and difficult to make sense of, so my art reflects that too. It’s a big mess, but by sharing it with the world I might find a way to be understood.”

The video was shot in four separate parts in the second half of 2024, with an overarching narrative to slot each segment into. Not everything went as initially planned, however. “I actually had to pull out of Sheron’s filming day at the last minute,” admits Mee. “But instead of postponing, Sheron and his team shot an entirely new story on the fly without me, and I was so stoked with their end product that I reworked the rest of the video to fit around it. I’m not sure I would have agreed to putting up missing posters of me if I had been there, but they shrewdly asked for forgiveness instead of permission.”

Big Mess from the record Talking to Music About People is out on all streaming services via Adelaide-based label capslock records. The stunning experimental music video will be out everywhere tomorrow.

Jachin Mee will next be performing on February 14 at the Grace Emily Hotel with Ryan Martin John and Katie Pomery.