Bob Ross + rave voyeurism inspires Malcolm’s Individuation In The Liquid Room short film, directed by Collin LaFleche

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, ‘individuation’ is “the determination of the individual in the general,” and what better place to express this state than in the context of the club? New York-based producer Malcolm is releasing a follow up to 2015’s malcolm​.​club EP release, with Individuation In The Liquid Room through the same UNO NYC label — responsible for some influential early releases by Arca, Mykki Blanco and Fatima Al Qadiri — on October 6. To accompany the new EP, there’ll be a launch event at New York’s Spectacle Theater tonight, October 5, as well as the premiere of the short film via AQNB below. It is also called Individuation In The Liquid Room and directed by Collin LaFleche and set in the inner sanctum of an alienating evening out in the crowd.

The nearly 20-minute video follows the first-person perspective of a club night voyeur, watching rather than joining the growing crowds of an EDM event, at one point even walking through a hallway of arcade games and washing their hands in the bathroom. It’s a familiar feeling of mundane loneliness only a live music lover would understand. 

The video is a mesmerising conceptual project, from an EP that includes a song title inspired by a shade of colour (the reference is enigmatically accompanied by a still of an episode of The Joy of Painting, where painter and cult personality Bob Ross uses ‘Pthalo Blue‘ ). In the Individuation In The Liquid Room film, the camera shifts focus across club archetypes, like ambient strobes — the back of someone’s heads — scored by the ambient and acid house influence of Malcolm’s music.** 

Malcolm’s Individuation In The Liquid Room EP is out via UNO NYC on October 6, with a launch event at New York’s Spectacle Theater on October 5, 2017.