Rival Consoles, the experimental project of musician Ryan West, releases the new album Now Is via Erased Tapes, and unveils the riveting audio/visual experience of newest single Vision of Self. The atmospheric and enveloping track is accompanied by an incredible video created by MarÃa Medem, featuring animation that expresses life experience and change.
Ryan West says about the track and video: “The title of the music reflects this sense ‘what is the self?’: it is both knowable and unknowable, it is always changing as we get older and as we pass through experiences, our relationship with ourselves, with others, with nature, dreams, love, hurt, desire, repair etc. I like the dream-like nature of thinking about this and how electronic music can echo that dream-like quality in an abstract yet identifiable way.
“I have been a huge fan of MarÃa’s work for a long time and have wanted to work on something together for many years, but I am so happy that it happened on this particular song, because I feel her style is perfectly harmonious with the nature of this piece of music.
“This piece is important to me because it is both repetitive but is also always changing in a deceptive way. There is something dreamlike about the waves of color that come and go, overlap and weave around each other. I love it when drama emerges out of non-dramatic things, so I spent a long time writing this piece of music and slowly letting it reach a point where that made sense, and letting it create its own little world.”
MarÃa Medem adds: “The idea behind the whole animation is exploring, without judgment, how we change through life and how what we live shapes us, while we shape others as well. I’ve used plenty of symbols to try to evoke atmospheres and feelings without the need of being too explicit and to give some room to the watcher to let those symbols have a personal meaning for them. In the animation, some actions, like throwing a stone, doesn’t have an immediate consequence, but with time, it does have an effect. That’s how through the whole story, different elements, in principle with no relation with each other, are finally connected.”
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Rival Consoles
Artist photo by Dan Medhurst
Video animation by MarÃa Medem
Erased Tapes
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