A gorgeous, very Pacific Northwestern music video for a new single from Portland trip-hop producer Emancipator, “Minor Cause,” debuted on MTV Hive yesterday (The track is off Emancipator’s forthcoming record Dusk to Dawn, out January 29). The hypnagogic video, which was filmed in Oregon by local director Ben Moon, follows Emancipator, a.k.a. Douglas Appling, as he treads ‘cross sand, naps in a grassy clearing, and bushwhacks through a fern-thick forest to finally arrive at a fireworks-illumined beach, all to a soundtrack of violin, wordless female vocals, and vaguely hallucinogenic beats.

Director Moon, who toasted the completion of this year-long project at a recent PoMo party, got his beautiful shots of the beautiful Northwest landscape by rigging his camera to a remote-controlled octocopter—a type of helicopter with eight, instead of two, propellers which is increasingly being used in cinematography as a relatively inexpensive aerial-photography method. The proof’s in the pudding that the technology worked—except for the time the octocopter burnt out mid-flight with Moon’s camera, worth thousands of dollars, attached. The director caught the camera as it fell from the sky—yikes!

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