Proud to present the new video for ‘Rain Can’t Reach Us’ by Yannis & The Yaw.
A note from Yannis:
Rain can't reach us is one my favourite pieces of music i've worked on.
Its like a dirty hymn...rough & roiling at the bottom, celestial strings & arps up at the top. It feels like it spins right in the middle of those two energies, in the exact middle between Tony & I with the yaw spinning around us.
If you could pinpoint the place where our energies all meet it would be here...if creativity had co-ordinates.
Kit worked so hard on this video too, pulling all nighters & getting chased out of stations.
He individually manipulated every frame of the AI stop motion of which there are 25 per second!
He also drove us to Dungeness & we had seafood in the desert.
God bless friendship & creativity.
If you don't dig it you're mad in the ear
Director Kit Monteith outlines the creative process behind the video:
The video came about from short visual experiments I'd created for the earlier tracks from the EP. Yannis and I liked the idea of trying to show the world around him shifting and changing in strange ways, which linked to the lyrical themes, so I started to develop the technique that we've now come to call AI Stop Motion. The visual effect involves the individual manipulation of every single frame, of which there are 25 per second, so it's a very labour intensive process. I soon discovered that the pace of change registered by the eye seemed to connect with Tony Allen's style of drumming; all the ghost notes and extra accents in his style were able to be picked out by the visual process and it was a wonderful way to highlight his playing and presence.
For ‘Rain Can't Reach Us’ we decided to embark on the most ambitious use of my technique yet and use it to symbolise potential futures for London, with desert sands rising up to engulf buildings and storm clouds raging in the skies above the city. Another part of the process for this video was to link the AI Stop Motion technique with the use of Hyperlapses. We're all used to seeing cameras capturing days or weeks go by in a few seconds ever since timelapses have become a standard part of our visual culture so I thought it could be a perfect way to push the feeling that the changes I constructed in the AI were happening across actual time, perhaps over months, years or even decades: cities rising out of a desert before burning to the ground only to be replaced by floods and storms or car parks turning into scrap yards and wasting away into a deserted landscape.
Within these imaginings of possible futures for our cities the irony of using a form of AI to visualise their destruction felt interesting to me. So much technology feels like it's being co-opted to be used in ways that don’t feel beneficial to us, I believe that artists and musicians must try to redress this balance whenever possible. The themes that Yannis explores on the EP seemed to be the perfect foundation for me to do so in the ‘Rain Can't Reach Us’ video.