A man begins speaking in Hindi as the video begins. “This footage looks real, isn’t it? You see people . . . are easy to believe what perceived by their senses [sic],” read the strange subtitles.“Because it’s easy, right? You see . . . when you start to question reality, you will start to feel like life is a video game, and you can shut down this machine anytime. So the final question is . . . do you have fun?”

In surreal fashion, the subtitles are completely unrelated to the actual audio, which in fact says, “Rooms are closed for an hour, did you know? That’s why America has technology that, when the room is left open for an hour, someone can record.” It is the first of many bizarre easter eggs for the viewer in this endlessly watchable, multilayered music video.

“Tomorrow Can Not Be Waited” [sic] is the lead single to Howie Lee’s upcoming full-length studio album, due out this fall. It’s a bold introduction to an album: like much of Lee’s recent work, the four-minute track forgoes any kind of standard song structure in favor of a series of quick thematic shifts, never to be revisited, that push the narrative along.

The track’s peculiar title is a reference to a story in the Daoist classic known as the Zhuangzi. In it, a madman named Jie Yu comes to Confucius’s door and asks why the sage has come to the state of Chu, a declining power. “The future cannot be waited for, the past cannot be chased,” the madman says enigmatically. In the larger context of the teachings of the Dao, these words are profound, invoking the idea that worry comes from having one’s mind in the future, and regret comes from having one’s mind in the past. We can only live in the moment and take things as they come.

The idea of embracing the present feels apt for a track that asks listeners to revel in its unpredictability. Although the composition jumps from one dramatic moment to the next, it still seems to sit comfortably in whatever is its present. Yet existing in the now doesn’t mean that the now is something harmonious. A cheerful intro, recalling the awakening of a new day, soon crescendos into plucked strings that might sound pleasantly anticipatory were it not for the dark bassline looming beneath. The track is chock-full of such moments: a little good in the evil sounds, a little evil in the good ones.

The video released along with the track is rich with evocative imagery, emphasizing the cinematic nature of the song. Created by Teom Chen of Taiwan, it’s a fascinating contemplation of the constructed or conventional nature of any society, using the imagery of video games and virtual reality to question whether human beings are indeed free. “I believe that humans don’t have free will,” Lee remarks. “People are products of their social environment.”

Riffing on this idea, the video opens with what appears to be a standard fighting video game, with a pair of hands holding a gaming controller in the corner. But with a flick of a button, the whole world shakes, revealing that this pair of hands controls not just the characters but their whole environment as well. The figure on screen, his sword in mid-swing, disappears in a fizzle and is replaced by a shirtless Indian man.

A moment later, the frame zooms out to reveal that this man, and the hands on the video game controller, are on a screen, opposite the same man in a set of VR goggles. He is not holding the controller, which suggests that someone else is controlling what he sees. All this takes place in a small room floating in an ocean in another video-game world. As the frame floats away, the scene changes and settles on a screen showing a live-action version of the same man, now seemingly fully in control of himself, laughing maniacally. To create this surreal sequence, Chen gathered a series of images of humans, and fed them to an AI program. After learning how to distinguish humans from other objects, the AI program randomly found and selected the live-action footage of the Indian man. Chen then modeled his own rendering of the recurring character after this footage.

The video also cleverly interpolates footage from one of Lee and Chen’s joint live shows. In these performances, the two stand opposite each other, Lee performing the music with an array of MIDI controllers laid out around him, and Chen using custom controllers and a laptop to navigate and manipulate the world he’s created. Events in the virtual realm can be triggered not just by Chen but also by Lee’s instruments, syncing the music and the visuals even more closely. As with the Indian protagonist, both filmed and virtually rendered versions of the two performers appear throughout the video. The duo thus appears simply as additional characters in the larger story. “The virtual and the real are on a converging path,” Chen says. “When mind and matter are one, the virtual is the real, the real is a dream.”

The layers in the video—filmed, virtual, screens within screens—lead the audience question to not only the existence of free will but also the very nature of our reality. This too has deep roots in Daoist texts, specifically in Zhuangzi’s famous dream that he was a butterfly and his subsequent question: is he in fact a butterfly dreaming he’s a man?

The artists insert themselves as characters in their own video, suggesting that the reality we perceive is just one more layer: who’s to say which layer is real? Chen says that these days, the dividing line between the virtual and the real has become less and less clear to him. His work is a reflection of these growing uncertainties. “Yesterday I had a dream,” he says. “At the entrance to the dream I had my hand on a switch—all I had to do was press it and I’d wake up. What do you think: should I press it?”

Like our stories? Follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Instagram: @howieleeofficial | @teomchen

Contributor: Kiril Bolotnikov
Chinese Translation: Olivia Li
Hindi Translation: Rewant Prakash