Check Out This Music Video for ‘Manipulator’ That You Can … Manipulate

Often, in our new golden age of music videos, promotional clips for new songs aren’t clips at all — they are stand-alone websites for a single song.

The latest example: “Manipulator,” the title cut of Ty Segall’s “ridiculously enjoyable glam-garage double album” (per Stereogum), can be enjoyed on a dedicated site where it can be, you know, manipulated.

It opens in a collage-aesthetic room setting, where, say, the artwork behind the singer can be converted to an image of a blurry chihuahua, a fried egg, and so on, by clicking around.

Change the curtains, adjust who is in the room with Segall, or click on Segall himself and cause a bunch of arms to abruptly project from his body.

A second scene splits Segall’s head and lets you manipulate what’s “inside” — maybe a mushroom cloud is what you’re looking for? Finally we get Segall in a landscape scene: Click the planes that fly by, and they become fish; click the sky and pyramids materialize. You get the idea. The collaboration between director Matt Yoka and coder/designer Simon Wiscombe “offers an almost infinite number of visual outcomes,” The New York Times concludes.

Try it out here.

Or, if all that clicking just sounds too strenuous for you, you can always just enjoy director Yoka’s traditional-video version of the experiment:

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