Hex Unveil Video 'Sight Beyond The Line' + Interview

Wellington witch rockers Hex will finally be releasing their debut album The Hill Temple this coming Valentines Day (Wednesday 14 February), and have shared a dreamlike video for the record's lead single 'Sight Beyond The Line'. It looks to be a watershed year for the band, founding members Kiki Van Newtown and GG Van Newtown recently spoke with us about the album, upcoming journey to South By Southwest in the US, and experiences contributing to Girls Rock! Camp Aotearoa. You can now read a candid bonus section of that interview with the duo, where they chat about the ideas and circumstances behind their new video artfully directed by Amber Beaton. Feast your eyes on the clip and read their words below...

Could you please tell us a bit about your video for 'Sight Beyond The Line', that's by Amber Beaton...

Kiki: She's brutal to work with. She has such a clear vision of what she wants. It was really fun working with her because at points, when I was like "This is what I want" and she'd say "This is what I want" and I'd be like "We're going to have a little fight about it."

GG: Kiki you were the producer and Amber was the director. Amber and Kiki worked on it together, I was just an actor.

Kiki: It was an incredible process and I would really love to work with her again. She's so uncompromising in what she'll do to get the shot that she wants. She made us be in Lake Taupo for two hours, really fucking freezing cold. She was just "Get in the lake." Then that night she was like "Okay I'm going to film this bit outside, I'm going to need to be putting the hose on you." It was a cold hose and it was really late at night. Then I thought I had hypothermia and thought I had to go to hospital. It looks amazing, it looks devastating. At one point when we were in the lake, she said "Stop being babies!" [laughs] Then at night when she was filming us under the hose she was like "Stop stop stop. What are you doing with your faces?" She was such a great director for us to work with. She totally knew how to work with us.

GG: We just wanted to have three or four beautiful scenes where we're in the scene in different natural landscapes. Amber's idea was to just go for the beauty and the witchiness and the pagan-ness. The video is just BOOM here is Hex.

Kiki: When I wrote the script there wasn't any storyline. It was more about the imagery of the song, drawing on a whole bunch of weird coincidences in terms of the lyrics and things that people had said and things that had happened. There was narrative through the imagery and symbolism, but there wasn't an actual narrative arc. Then Amber was like "I want a narrative arc." So she figured out how all these things could fit together in a narrative arc. It's actually very interesting to create a bunch of ideas and spend a lot of time conceptualising something in your head, and then essentially hand it over to someone else. I loved that process of just handing it off, and being like "you put your thing on it." I'm really happy with the result, it elicits so much emotion from me where I'm just like "I don't give a shit what it's about." It's not even a thing that I'm watching, it's an emotional response I'm having while I watch it. Thank you Amber.

GG: It ended up being Jason Erskine is a Morris dancer, and he represents patriarchy. Kiki and I are a couple of witches.

Kiki: We represent the fall of patriarchy. [laughs]

Hex will be celebrating the release of their debut album 'The Hill Temple' alongside Earth Tongue and Finn Johansson at Wellington's Meow on Valentine's Day, Wednesday 14th February. For more info and tickets see HERE.