PREMIERE: Rasmus Leon’s ‘Young(er)/Strong(er)’ Invokes 8-Bit Nostalgia

Charlotte musician, educator, filmmaker and artist Will Davis, who creates under the mysterious moniker Rasmus Leon, delves deep into 1980s 8-bit nostalgia for his new animated video “Young(er)/Strong(er),” which we’re premiering below.

In the video, a two-dimensional depiction of Davis strides steadily down a black-and-white main street as the frame side-scrolls left to right. 

Imagine the earliest iterations of Donkey Kong or Super Mario, except instead of rescuing a princess from turtle king Bowser or a giant gorilla, the game’s protagonist passes people and places from Davis’s childhood hometown of Wilkesboro, including Minton Pawn & Music, Henderson’s Flower Shop and Wilkes County Library.

In lieu of the cheery/cheesy beeping of vintage video game music, we hear plaintive cabaret closing-time piano wrapped in lowing, cradling cello. Davis’s breathy wistful vocal seems to emanate from the ether:

“When I was young/ I got stronger/ every day/ so they say/ Then getting old/ was a whole/ lifetime away/ (it’s) okay…”

The Davis avatar’s clothes dissipate and blow away as the monochrome landscape of ghost memories transforms into a ruined and flooded town where primordial trees and vines have overtaken the buildings. 

As Davis jumps platforms, his skin dissolves, revealing muscle and sinew. Then splashes of color appear in the background — yellow stars and blue and red flowers.

Meanwhile, swaying drums, whirling keyboards and windborne harmonies sidle into the soundscape as Davis’ town turns into a magical dreamscape of waterfalls, floating fairy lights, jagged mountain peaks and giant mushrooms. 

“I was warming up my heart/ I was feeling out the parts/ I was standing in the dark/ I was staring at the start…”

Rasmus Leon sings songs for in-between spaces

The song “Young(er)/Strong(er)” is one of  five on Davis’ EP, …and the Foothills, which drops Friday, Feb. 7. 

Davis’s band — composed of himself on vocals and piano, Stephen Warwick (Ancient Cities) on drums, and Hampton Crump on cello — will play his yearning phantasmagoric tunes at The Long Room on Monday, Feb. 17. (Both Davis and Warwick play on “Young(er)/Strong(er),” while the cello is played by Athens, Georgia, musician Nik Geerken.)

Each song on the EP explores life’s in-between spaces — points where you’ve left a situation but haven’t yet stepped into the next. This theme is at the forefront of “Young(er)/Strong(er),” which Davis says deals with life’s separations, changes and memories.

“It’s like a putty when you pull it,” he says. “There’s these thin lines that are holding it, but it’s becoming two distinct parts. There’s that lack of tension right before it disassembles.”

The inspiration for the song came at a point when Davis felt his life was in transition. In 2019, he was balancing running his successful visual marketing firm Small Creatures with an academic career as UNC Charlotte’s first full-time film studies teacher. 

Then his parents’ growing health problems and his mother’s need to move into an assisted living facility compelled Davis to sift through his childhood home to decide what to keep and what to toss.

At the house, there was an out-of-tune piano, Davis says. He started playing it and the song’s opening lines about being young and getting older just came to him.

The process of turning his childhood home inside out had a profound effect on the project that would become …and the Foothills. Songs on the EP range from the prowling “Basement,” which opens with the sound of the house’s front door creaking open; the rolling rimshot-thunder of “Thee MTN Bottom;” and the magisterial epic “The End,” which concludes with the buzzing of a 1960s oven timer suggestive of fossil radiation unleashed by the big bang.

In 2023, Davis was buffeted by further life changes involving his marriage and the death of his mother. As a result of the stress, Davis stepped down as the head of UNC Charlotte’s Film Studies Program, a position he held for nearly two years. He remains a full-time faculty member in the program.

“I’m still processing, and literally working through, [those] changes,” Davis says, explaining why the EP, which was recorded in 2023, is dropping now. “Releasing this work builds a new invisible structure to house the emotions which drove me to transform them into sounds in the first place.”

He also offers why he’s chosen to  accompany the autobiographical “Young(er)/Strong(er)” with such an illustrative and unusual video.

“I was looking to tell a story of having a physical understanding of where you’re at, but [also] having this psychic connection to a past that still feels very much alive — and trying to reckon a balance between the two,” Davis says. 

An animated collaboration 

In the video, animated by Parisian artist frenchpixel, Davis’ avatar first passes real places in Wilkesboro.

“I sent a lot of drawings and artwork that I did to the animator, and she pulled the elements that were striking to her to incorporate into the landscape,” Davis says. 

In the process, Davis let go of the idea that buildings should directly represent the real-life locations in Wilkesboro. When he asked frenchpixel to depict a church, he was surprised and pleased to see that the Paris-based animator provided a cathedral with stained glass windows, rather than the country chapel Davis remembered.  

As Davis’s journey progresses in the “Young(er)/Strong(er)” video, his memories morph into a kind of personal mythology. His 8-bit avatar continues through mountainous, increasingly magical dreamscapes, shedding layers of exposed muscle and organs down to bone. 

Finally, Davis’s skeleton dissolves as night falls: “I was wearing out my heart/ I was losing it in parts/ Chasing after sparks/ Fading into dark…”

“In the end, the figure turns into dust or stars or something in between,” Davis says. “Even the loss of something can be its own seed planted for whatever comes next.”

With the nostalgic, shapeshifting video for “Young(er)/Strong(er),” Davis provides a perspective where the cosmic and commonplace conjoin, where dissolution of the physical world is not the end, but a jumping off point into the infinite.