You know the season. You know what time it is. Your favorite artists are sundowning the world spinning end of 2024. Breakout upstarts have offered anchors of hope as the influential legacy world builders have unveiled magnificent magnum opuses (A Certain Ratio even dropped an xmas release). And as we have witnessed, the venerable and revered cult institutions have met the curtain call of year’s end with troves of wonders. Articles of creative beauty, crafts of wonder, delivering arts that are testaments to inimitable ethics and identities of storied devotion.

Presenting the long awaited follow-up to 2019’s Losing My Shadow, Portland’s own Aan delivers the video for “Speculum Aenigmate” from their new album Over the Mountain. The new album from Bud Wilson and company dazzles with somatic sentiments on the grooving "My Body", the density dives of "Black Hole", journeying into the unknown ether of "Laced and Lost", to the enchanted and entrancing "Dope Magic". Embracing the ennui and alchemy of "Waiting Around", to scouring the thread lines of "Searching For Seams", to scouring the broken earth on "Break the World in Two". "Neon Orange Leash" shines color saturated light on the roads and sidewalks ahead, concluding the record with the penultimate "Cold Grey Eyes" that arrives at a smoldering piano lead ballad that brings it all back home with an icy and exhausted glance, leaving room for the possibility of infinite joy and approximations of hope on “Smile”.

The Mike Adame-created visuals for "Speculum Aenigmate" approximates what life might be like whilst caught within the the kaleidoscopic shuffle. An exercise in art house experimentation, Aan's own unique sound is complemented with a dazzling array of visuals that traverses the wild ranges of analog/digital paradigms. Like a screen test amplified through a variety of modules, mixers, and whatever else is around; "Speculum" becomes elevated toward echelons of the unknown that ignites the senses in a spectrum of mesmerizing sound, colors, formats, and genres that have yet to be named. Borrowing its name from the Jorge Luis Borges essay “The Mirror of Enigmas” found in the omnibus Labyrinths, Aan immerses the eyes and ears of the beholder within the infinitude of the universes that abound throughout the elaborate and elegant libraries of the heart and soul.

Bud Wilson of Aan offered the following exclusive insights on the visuals for “Speculum Aenigmate”:

Mike Adame used footage mostly cut from stacks of 60’s photography magazines and random unlabeled VHS tapes. They were then scanned to computer and shot back out into an old analog Panasonic mixer, effected them taste. It's as surreal as it is unsettling. The title of the song comes from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. Basically, everything is the opposite of what it seems.

Aan’s new album Over the Mountain is available now via Fresh Selects.