THE LAST DINOSAUR is the musical nom-de-plume of Jamie Cameron, of whom we said the following when he first trailed “Wholeness & The Implicate Order” last month; and which we unashamedly reproduce herein.
“THERE is out there, in the wide pantheon of pop, a neat little galaxy reserved for the absolute auteur, the sort of artiste whose canon is basically unassailable, whose deftness and complexity is the subject of whispers.
“I mean, Kate Bush. She has to be in there; OK, not my bag personally, but. The Blue Nile are in there. Talk Talk? Vraiment. They have to be. The Paddy McAloon of I Trawl the Megahertz. Scott Walker; maybe Van Dyke Parks. There are others.
“But the latest artist who’s shaping for admittance to that recherché and august body might just be The Last Dinosaur, the music-world avatar of Jamie Cameron.
“You may have swooned just a little for the acoustic hush of 2017’s The Nothing, in which he was operating in a very pretty whispered country out there with M. Ward and Iron & Wine as neighbouring homesteaders; but if the track he’s just dropped, “Wholeness & The Implicate Order”, is anything to go by, then he’s made a leap of the magnitude of The Colour of Spring to Spirit of Eden.
“[It’s] no 180-second pop fizz to ease you over the threshold to his new album. The majesty, the power, the arrangements. Which film might this serve as the theme for? I found myself asking as that intimately close viola gave way to the grandiose brass, building ever over a subtle piano cadence. And it slowly slides out into heavy rain, subtly filtered as if beating off the acoustics of an underpass. WOW.”
And now he’s added an extra dimension in the shape of an accompanying monochrome short film directed by the talented Aniket Dutta, whose debut experimental feature film, last year’s Ghost Of The Golden Groves, was warmly received on the international film festival circuit.
Speaking about the video she said: “The track shares its name with a book by quantum physicist David Bohm. The first thing that came to mind was to add a multi-dimensional layer to the video, so I borrowed a character from my debut feature who lives in a different dimension.
“Going through the Covid pandemic also gave us a good opportunity to self-reflect. It’s a scenario where one sometimes has a physical sensation of dreaming it all … I’ve tried to capture this mind-body dualism through the video.”
Jamie says of both track and the short film: “This piece began it life in 2012 and was finally finished this year. [It’s a] collaboration between me, Luke Hayden (piano), Rachel Lanskey (viola) and Lewis Daniel (brass and wind).
“ … A mess of memories. The magic to the mundane to the malevolent. Eventually the music is overwhelmed by the elements. Instruments continue playing until they’re lost to the wind, static, footsteps, electricity. Transitory bullshit ultimately designated insignificant by the relentless and overwhelming order of nature.
“The video is a stark, black and white visual filmed on location in the derelict buildings of Kolkata: a narrative of two characters from different dimensions who are stuck in the same house. It’s a testament to Aniket’s talent that he could create such a compelling piece of art during a global pandemic.”
So this is the first single, then? What else can the album, Wholeness (a not-so-subtle obverse to the last album? An everything?) be holding in store?
The Last Dinosaur’s Wholeness is due out on October 23rd via Phases; pre-save the album here.
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