You tie the red shoes to rhythms you do not choose
You dance, you dance to rhythms you do not choose
Athens synth-punk outfit Dramachine takes Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes, drags it through a series of back rooms full of busted strobes and analogue machines, and come back with Choros tou Thanatou, a dance of death sung in Greek, with a mesmerizing video. Directed by Antoinette Tat, with Eleni Kosmopoulou behind the camera and Myrsini Lyra as the doomed dancer, the clip turns compulsion into choreography, then lets the body pay the bill.
Speed can become more disturbing when someone sings over it, as they have already accepted the crash. Choros tou Thanatou moves like a cheap car with the brakes cut: frenetic, kinetic, hi-octane, all hard angles and bad nerves. The beat has that wonderful low-budget death-machine insistence, snapping forward while the synths jab and glare. Yet the vocals come in strangely plodding, deliberate, almost numb in their delivery, giving the track an unnerving imbalance. You are, with no doubt, being commanded.
The video interprets the old fairy tale without embalming it in literary respect. The Red Shoes has always been a nasty little moral engine: a girl wants beauty, the world punishes appetite, and the body becomes a prison with music playing inside it. Here, that punishment becomes feverish and theatrical, with the dancer condemned to motion until motion itself begins to look like possession. The band members appear as the diabolical Charmer and the helpless Angel, two sides of the same rotten bargain, temptation and pity staring at each other across the frame.
Tat leans into a Lynchian unease without turning the piece into mere quotation. The retro eighties visual effects, abrupt edits, and unreal colour treatments give the video the texture of a cursed television broadcast picked up on a dead channel in some Athens apartment at 3 a.m. Lyra’s performance supplies the ache beneath the velocity: every gesture feels pulled from her by invisible strings, every turn another small surrender.
Watch the video for Choros tou Thanatou below:
As the title track from Dramachine’s March 2026 album, Choros tou Thanatou works as both a warning and an invitation. Desire enters smiling, compulsion takes over the room, and by the end the dance has become less an escape than a sentence.
Listen to Choros tou Thanato below, and order the album here
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