Blitzen Trapper - Wild Mountain Nation

2007

Blitzen Trapper - Wild Mountain Nation (2007) Director: Orie Weeks III Era: Mid-2000s Indie Folk/Rock Breakthrough (2007) - Peak year of the Pacific Northwest lo-fi indie explosion, coinciding with Blitzen Trapper's critical breakthrough and Sub Pop signing High curatorial value as the first-ever official music video produced by Blitzen Trapper, a band whose 2007 breakthrough is a documented inflection point in Pacific Northwest indie history. The hybrid animation/live-action format, extreme slow editing pace (avg shot 83s), and warm lo-fi palette make it a rare artifact of DIY mixed-media music video craft from the pre-HD indie era, directly contemporaneous with the Sub Pop/Pitchfork critical axis that defined 2007–2009 indie canon. Context: Released in 2007 amid a wave of critical enthusiasm for lo-fi Pacific Northwest indie rock, 'Wild Mountain Nation' arrived the same year Blitzen Trapper signed to Sub Pop Records and received Pitchfork's 'Best New Music' designation with an 8.5 rating. Rolling Stone ranked the title track No. 98 on its Best Songs of 2007 list, calling it 'the best Grateful Dead knockoff in forever.' The video, the band's first official visual release, debuted a hybrid animation/live-action aesthetic that aligned with the broader 2007–2008 indie DIY visual culture in which bands self-produced multimedia artifacts as extensions of their lo-fi recording philosophy. The band recorded the album at their own studio in an old telegraph building by the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, cementing the Pacific Northwest geography as both sonic and visual identity. Director notes: This was Blitzen Trapper's first official music video, described in Wikipedia's Blitzen Trapper article as a 'half-animated/half-live action clip' promoting the title track of the 2007 album. The IMDB short film listing places its release year as 2008, suggesting a post-album promotional release window. The video's extremely slow editing pace (2 scene changes, avg shot length ~83s) and warm, low-contrast aesthetic are consistent with the band's self-recorded, four-track DIY production philosophy documented across their discography. The hybrid animation/live-action format echoes the band's stated use of 'a dizzying variety of techniques and media' in making the album itself.