Video Exclusive: Yes Plant – Mystery Coke Machine

Sunderland music collective, Yes Plant, is a project which is inspired by synth/indie pop and spoken word and that heavily focuses on irony, comedy and experimentation. Their latest release Mystery Coke Machine is a John Cale-esque soundscape of haunting piano and poetic storytelling that takes you on a voyage of intrigue and paranoia before finally succumbing to song in its dying seconds. Mesmeric and engaging this is a slice of lo-fi auditory art that is made even more lucid by the video that accompanies it. A video we’re pleased to premiere via the NARC website.

Yes Plant’s Jake Anderson tells us more…

“Mystery Coke Machine is my favourite song from the album, so I was always going to work on a video. Compared to the music video for telephone (which was made in a day) I was putting a lot of thought into Mystery Coke’s music video – storyboard and everything.

The music video was edited and filmed by me (Jake Anderson / Tired Trace), I also wrote the track and did vocals while Matthew Jameson produced and mixed.  The video has no intense shots with every clip fading into each other; this is because Mystery Coke Machine is a slow, ambient song that uses spoken word. The video needed to reflect this. 

Mystery Coke Machine makes us listen to a man’s descent into paranoia as he becomes fixated on this one stupid and insignificant thing. 

Shots like the clock, door handle and street lights are there to unnerve the viewer with their lighting, but the phone also serves the purpose of emphasising the writing of the song. The track is written as if we are eavesdropping on a conversation, this was to also emphasise the paranoia of being listening in on, but the phone proposes that this person is mid conversation. This idea of eavesdropping is brought back when the static plays at the end and we see a headset similar to something possibly used by someone listening in. Some shots like the coke can being blown away mid shot were accidental, but were too good not to put in. I used that particular shot to sorta show when the descent really begins. 

The end of the video also includes a small teaser video for the song ‘A Country Drive’. There will be no video for that song, but we thought it would be fun to include a teaser for what else is to come.”