Michael Zodorozny’s new video for the insanely catchy chant Land of the Vole hits like a forgotten reel dug out of some basement vault where the paint smells faintly of ozone. It’s a trip, but not the kind that pats you on the head and tells you to relax. This thing jitters with hand-painted life: brushstrokes twitch, colors tilt, voles scurry underground, and the whole frame moves like it’s trying to breathe on its own. Zodorozny wanders through this underground labyrinth, it’s all like a time-bent traveler who accidentally stepped into a page torn from his own subconscious. One moment he’s anchored in the painted terrain; the next he’s swallowed by its contours, as if the Mary Poppins chalk-drawing moment grew teeth and developed an agenda.
“Land of the Vole” feels like the logical offspring of his history: Crash Course in Science’s DIY voltage, the Pyramid Club’s wild-eyed performance nights, Test Pilot’s fascination with perception and inner drift…but it never settles for nostalgia. These paintings lunge forward like they’ve been waiting decades for someone to finally animate their secrets. Every frame has the energy of a postcard from a parallel dimension, stamped and mailed by a version of Michael who never left the easel.
Beneath the lacquer of swirling color and jittering brushstrokes lies the real hook: this saga isn’t told from some heroic perch above the clouds, it’s rooted in the dim borough beneath our feet, where a humble vole stumbles into cosmic catastrophe. Down there, in the earthy hush where roots tangle like old wiring, an alien craft burrows into the soil. And instead of humans scrambling to interpret the intrusion, the universe lets the vole take the first look. Or “look,” at least, in whatever way its tiny, near-sightless body can register a visitor from the void.
That’s the pulse running under the paint. The video paints the encounter not as a disaster but a strange communion. The vole, this unassuming ground-dweller, becomes our accidental emissary; its burrow becomes the first embassy for something unearthly. Zodorozny wanders through these hand-painted realms like he’s trespassing through the vole’s newfound visions: slipping through warped tunnels, drifting across impossible color fields, stepping lightly through scenes that tremble as if the tremors of the crash are still echoing. He’s not leading the story; he’s translating it, following the vole’s senses into a world that reshapes itself faster than meaning can catch up.
Land of the Vole was created with confident propulsion behind the images. But the star here is the paint: thick strokes that warp into landscapes, faces that blur into scenery, little visual riddles tucked inside corners like mischievous gremlins. By the end, you feel like you’ve traveled through a gallery where the art suddenly broke free and started muttering its own thoughts.
Watch Land of the Vole, produced by Matia Simovich, below:
Listen to Land of the Vole below and order the single, out now via Electronic Emergencies, here.
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