After the band teased the project with single releases, fans of Monoculture now get to witness their eight-minute short film ‘Beyond Material’, the latest thoughtful dive into the modern world from founding duo Faayani Aboma Mijana and Nick Leibold. Since moving to Chicago in 2019, Monoculture has built a sound of psychedelia and jazz fusion, exploring new instrumentation for vast commentaries. Supporting the likes of Brian Jonestown Massacre as well as the Mild High Club, they’ve drawn a dedicated crowd of support, and use this base to raise political awareness.
With their new short film ‘Beyond Material’, Monoculture put visuals to the cause of their music, giving each note, alongside their poetic lyricism an even deeper meaning. Taking on the construct of the modern workplace, Monoculture connects the past and present, showing the characters to break free from the rigidity and captivity still in place today, just in new ways.
The band dives deeper, “The film is about workers who experience the workplace as a new plantation. The commentary here is that, under our current system, we ostensibly have freedom, but in actuality, we are wage slaves who must work to survive. Even then, living is often meagre, even if the work is hard. I call the film ‘Beyond Material’ because I recognise that the fight for a better world is more than just a material struggle, there’s also an ideological component to that struggle, and this film humbly joins that struggle.”