Sodden Creeper
Blue Soup

Faithful to their calibrated visual style, in Sodden Creeper Blue Soup focus on a particular, if peculiar, character—an unusual choice for a group which often creates unpopulated landscapes and interiors.

Their «sodden creeper» is an organic shape—a leviathan in terms of size—that floats in an abstract space beneath a rainy night sky. Closer to rain as a meteorological phenomenon than to an outside observer in its scale and inconceivability, this creature is a sort of hyperobject (an object so large and complex that it cannot be comprehended in its entirety). 

“The Last Summer Day,” a foxtrot by the Soviet composer Alexander Tsfasman played as if off an old vinyl record, almost merges with the sound of rain. The soundscape of Sodden Creeper is close to musical hauntology—a movement not limited to a particular genre that, according to its theorists, features traces of memory phantoms and of a «nostalgia for a future that never came to pass.»

The choice of a melody dating back to 1938 creates an image of destructive nostalgia: memories of a rainy day in August or an old foxtrot seem to bring the dark protagonist of the video into materiality. 

The inconceivability, cyclicality, and memory references of Sodden Creeper are in dialogue with the consumption of ultrashort content on media distribution platforms such as TikTok and their effects on the viewer’s experience of self. Observing the peristaltic wave of the «creeper» is not unlike binge-watching video content on such platforms. But Blue Soup use this effect to bring up more complex and contradictory experiences; passivity and awe when faced with a mysterious object.