The camera shows an apartment with cracked and peeling walls, empty except for two old lamps that flicker, only deepening the gloom.
A masked figure pushes a wheelchair into the center of the room, then leaves. In it sits a young man dressed in a hospital gown, hunched over an acoustic guitar. A title card flashes: “Hi Ren.” Looking up, the guitarist begins to pluck out a flamenco-style tune, which, after a few bars, lingers on a bended note before sputtering into a series of dissonant arpeggios that climb the neck. The melodic line pivots again—now to a simple round of harmonious chords, the stuff of countless folk songs. And then the performer begins to sing …
The next eight minutes defy genre labels, although the song contains elements of hip-hop and punk, plus a little yodeling. It is a piece of one-man musical theater featuring two characters, both called Ren. (The artist is a young Welsh singer-songwriter named Ren Gill.) One of them is a musician, just barely back on his feet after years of a debilitating illness. The other is a personification of his anxiety and self-contempt, with a raspy voice full of needles and poison, who gets the best lines. The characters have contrasting demeanors and even play the same tune differently. Clearly they have been fighting for a long time. The healthy Ren wants to escape his doppelgänger, or even destroy it, but he remains at a profound disadvantage: you cannot escape your own shadow.