Shrenik Ganatra creates new music video for Minaxi inspired by Victorian erotica

Born in Mumbai, India, and now based in Brooklyn, New York, he's also the guitarist and vocalist of Brooklyn-based shoegaze band Minaxi.

Ganatra designed the sleeve and identity for the debut Minaxi LP, released in March, and has just unveiled his work on the video for its first single Stargazer, which was released earlier this month.

The designer says that the graphic style of Aubrey Beardsley profoundly inspires the look and feel of the video. The 19th-century English illustrator and author is best known for his work as co-founder of The Yellow Book literary journal and his associations as a leading figure in the Aesthetic Movement alongside Oscar Wilde, for whom he illustrated Salomé. A "yellow book" is also a key plot point as a significant corrupting influence on Dorian, the central character in Wilde's 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

While such work seems a far cry from 21st-century alt-rock, the Beardsley influence is shown in the video through its combination of "silhouettes with macro shots of black and white paint interacting with each other to form galactic patterns", alongside psychedelic background visuals – as Ganatra describes it.

He adds, "The native footage is that of the interaction between black and white paint, using a combination of milk, water, and hand soap as a catalyst. The reaction was captured in the course of a few hours. The resulting footage resembled abstract, galactic forms. The output was then colour-corrected and edited in Adobe Premiere Pro to match the tempo of the song."

Minaxi, which formed in 2018, realised its debut EP, Zidd, on 12 July last year, showing off its blend of shoegaze, hard rock, surf and psychedelia, with lyrics in both English and Hindi. "I grew up listening to melodic Hindustani pop music and rock and Sufi music from Pakistan," says Ganatra, citing. Jal – The Band, A.R. Rahman, Lucky Ali, Strings and Junoon as some of his musical influences.