Art Feynman Releases 'DOWN WITH HEAVEN' Music Video

Art Feynman—the moniker of songwriter, visual artist and producer Luke Temple—has shared a brand new single titled 'Down With Heaven.' Available now on all streaming platforms, 'Down With Heaven' is accompanied by an official music video co-directed by Dillon Hayes and Hayden Mason which turns surveillance technology into a portrait of humanity.

Expanding on the concept behind 'Down With Heaven' Temple shared, 'Heaven is a concept that, if aimed for, only bolsters its opposite. Even as we move toward a largely secular world, the childish urge for a utopia still exists. It is thinly veiled within our obsession with optimization and our attempts to erase every blemish. Because we lack widely accepted rituals for acknowledging our darker aspects, they manifest in twisted ways.'

Hayes detailed the concept of the music video noting, 'I've long been used to the idea that the tech elite view human life as something to be enumerated, optimized for, and exploited for profit, but ever since I learned that self-driving cars use these types of Lidar scanners to see the world (and that the scanners are also increasingly used for crowd control and surveillance) it's been hard not to see myself as a series of depersonalized dots and lines, walking through the world and being observed as data on a physical plane. We wanted to make a video that communicates that feeling of being watched in our day-to-day lives by the machines we've created. We also wanted to use this technology to record some of the most beautiful things humans are capable of and capture the tension between our highest potential and our worst tendencies.'

'I'm a cinematographer, and around the time generative video got convincing, I started wondering what it means to capture an image if we can't tell what's real anymore,' added Mason. 'I started developing these industrial Lidar scanners to work like cameras, capturing only distance and time without any light or color information. When Dillon sent me the song it felt like a perfect match. Something about seeing ourselves through the eyes of our technology felt right for this. Many months of filming, coding, and editing later, here we are.'

Art Feynman is the eccentric, genre-defying musical persona of acclaimed songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Luke Temple, best known as the frontman of Here We Go Magic. Across a career spanning more than two decades, Temple has continually pushed beyond conventional genre boundaries, moving from the psychedelic folk and krautrock of Here We Go Magic to a shape-shifting solo catalog that has incorporated folk, R&B, reggae, electronic music and worldbeat. He introduced Art Feynman in 2017 with Blast Off Through the Wicker, a hypnotic, four-track-recorded fusion of dub, krautrock, Nigerian highlife and experimental pop, followed by 2020's Half Price at 3:30, which expanded his palette with Afrobeat, synth-pop and electronic textures while drawing inspiration from artists including Arthur Russell, Paul Simon and Harry Nilsson. In 2023, Temple unveiled Be Good the Crazy Boys, transforming Art Feynman from a solitary studio experiment into a full live band and drawing on the restless funk, post-punk and global rhythms of Talking Heads, Grace Jones and Lizzy Mercier Descloux. Across each incarnation, Temple's music has remained united by an instinct for experimentation, an affection for overlooked musical traditions and a singular ability to turn unlikely combinations of rhythm, texture and melody into something unmistakably his own.

Photo Credit: AUBREY TRINNAMAN