Back in October, we wrote about the excellent Golden Tongue by Brooklyn’s Magana, an EP that managed to create a rich atmosphere and narrative in just four songs. To further celebrate the release, Audio Antihero is putting out ‘Inches Apart’ as a single, complete with remix B-sides and a rather stunning video.
As we described in our review, the song is “fragile and delicate, playing like a morning after some traumatic event,” and the video portrays such a feeling with subtle expertise. Directed by Lauren Finerman, the piece is far more developed and well-crafted than your average music video, enlisting choreographer Liz Tenuto and dancers Lindsey Renee Derry and Nicholas Korkos, as well as the talents of cinematographer Ben Lunden, to weave a beautiful and quietly devastating four minutes. By layering the spirit of the song through various forms, from dance and visual imagery to the lonely drip of rains now past, Finerman harnesses the melancholic beauty in which the song is submerged. Indeed, our concluding remarks for the song in the original review now read like mission statement for the video, the “smells and sounds and phantom feelings wisping their way into the present, leaving the narrator to grasp whatever negligible weight they still hold.”
Watch the video, which premiered on For Folk’s Sake yesterday below:
While such a video is capable of carrying the single all on it’s own, Magana has pushed the boat out and invited Audio Antihero favourites Frog and Benjamin Shaw to remix her songs as b-sides. If you’re unfamiliar, the former have put out two of the most frenetic, verbose releases you’re ever likely to hear, with both Frog and Kind of Blah having us wax lyrical and struggle not quote the lyrics in their entirety. Here they put their spin on Magana’s ‘Golden Tongue’, transforming what was originally a song of “lonely defiance as sung at the dead of night” into a veritable dance hit.
Benjamin Shaw, who in 2015 released the beautiful Guppy (and has written for us in the past), takes an altogether more morose approach, taking the already pensive ‘Inches Apart’ and stripping things back even further. With the instrumentation reduced to lonely electronics, and Shaw’s glitchy, ghoulish backing vocals washing across the blank space, this is a ghostly variant of the single, the version that will echo through abandoned cyberspace long after humanity has fallen.
The ‘Inches Apart’ single is out tomorrow and will be available via Bandcamp then, and of course Golden Tongue is still out now via Audio Antihero. Also, last year Magana made us a playlist as part of our Mini Mix series, so be sure to have a look at that if you haven’t already.