Music / Premieres
Video Premiere:
Sebastian Field - Time May Wake Us All
Sebastian Field - Time May Wake Us All
Canberra solo artist Sebastian Field collaborates with CBR expat Angus Johnstone for a deeply serene video that recasts the everyday as a glitching alien landscape.
Inner peace is pretty hard to come by at the moment, which makes the pulse-slowing meditative influence of Sebastian Field’s ‘Time May Wake Us All’ that much more rewarding. Between its rippling piano and disembodied vocal harmonies, this glacial, inward-looking ballad is as instantly calming as Brian Eno’s 1978 ambient benchmark Music for Airports.
And it’s now been paired with a video that’s every bit as immersive and soothing, thanks to a collaboration between Field and fellow Canberra native Angus Johnson. Utilising what they describe as “half-rendered and broken landscapes of Canberra via Google Earth,” the video glides along at both ground and sky level to survey an askew perspective of our usual world - something that feels all too appropriate as the world at large finds itself transformed by COVID-19. Shuddering with VHS-style erosion against Minecraft-esque angles and edges, the video also takes in a particularly starry night sky.
“For Johnstone, an expat Canberran, the visuals represent a confluence of nostalgia and abandonment, somewhat influenced by the current dystopic reality cultivated by the coronavirus pandemic,” says the press release. “For Field, through the pairing of Johnstone’s perspectives with a track that revealed itself to refer to personal investigations into childhood, a convergence of meaning was produced.”
The song itself is a poignant mood-setter that opens Field’s 2019 album Picture Stone, his proper solo debut following years spent in adventurous Australian bands like Cracked Actor and Julia and the Deep Sea Sirens. Released through Provenance Records (also home to Aphir, Arrom and Shoeb Ahmad), Picture Stone also inspired a seven-track remix EP. With its wispy layers and almost subliminal details, ‘Time May Wake Us All’ invites us to return for closer examination and deeper connection.
The video does the same. And as the press release observes, it’s subverted feel is all too timely: “The misalignment between poorly mapped representations of a virtual world and reality highlights the importance of real-world connection on a physical, emotional and spiritual level, especially at the time we collectively currently find ourselves in.”
If those isolation-inspired gaps and gulfs are exposed in the video, there’s also a warm and delicate touch throughout that might remind us of our resilient humanity. It even lets us see something as mundane as Australia’s suburban-sprawled capital city in a majestic kind of flux, providing an escapist reset for our overloaded eyes and ears.
And it’s now been paired with a video that’s every bit as immersive and soothing, thanks to a collaboration between Field and fellow Canberra native Angus Johnson. Utilising what they describe as “half-rendered and broken landscapes of Canberra via Google Earth,” the video glides along at both ground and sky level to survey an askew perspective of our usual world - something that feels all too appropriate as the world at large finds itself transformed by COVID-19. Shuddering with VHS-style erosion against Minecraft-esque angles and edges, the video also takes in a particularly starry night sky.
“For Johnstone, an expat Canberran, the visuals represent a confluence of nostalgia and abandonment, somewhat influenced by the current dystopic reality cultivated by the coronavirus pandemic,” says the press release. “For Field, through the pairing of Johnstone’s perspectives with a track that revealed itself to refer to personal investigations into childhood, a convergence of meaning was produced.”
The song itself is a poignant mood-setter that opens Field’s 2019 album Picture Stone, his proper solo debut following years spent in adventurous Australian bands like Cracked Actor and Julia and the Deep Sea Sirens. Released through Provenance Records (also home to Aphir, Arrom and Shoeb Ahmad), Picture Stone also inspired a seven-track remix EP. With its wispy layers and almost subliminal details, ‘Time May Wake Us All’ invites us to return for closer examination and deeper connection.
The video does the same. And as the press release observes, it’s subverted feel is all too timely: “The misalignment between poorly mapped representations of a virtual world and reality highlights the importance of real-world connection on a physical, emotional and spiritual level, especially at the time we collectively currently find ourselves in.”
If those isolation-inspired gaps and gulfs are exposed in the video, there’s also a warm and delicate touch throughout that might remind us of our resilient humanity. It even lets us see something as mundane as Australia’s suburban-sprawled capital city in a majestic kind of flux, providing an escapist reset for our overloaded eyes and ears.
Immerse yourself in the new clip for 'Time May Wake Us All' above, and head to Sebastian Field's bandcamp to listen to Picture Stone in full.
