Scottish artist SHHE released her debut album last night, a wonderful fusion of electronic introspection.
Composed from her home studio in Dundee, SHHE delved into the personal, arranging this with potent prevision.
Now she's back. New album 'Re:' is kind of a counterpart to her earlier work, a series of remixes, re-works, and full collaborations.
We're able to share a fresh take on 'BOY', with Alva Noto stepping in on remix duties. Gently teasing apart SHHE's musicality, this new version locates new space in her work, adding potent additions.
There's a full video for the remix, too, one that finds SHHE working alongside Scottish audio-visual artist Tommy Perman.
SHHE – real name Su Shaw – comments…
“The original video for 'BOY' was centred around ideas of movement, environment and the passing of time. When Tommy and I started working on the visuals for the remix, it had been a year since the track was released and I thought it would be interesting to go back to these same themes and to look at them from a new perspective, one that wasn’t possible to predict or imagine a year ago.”
“Tommy and I talked about creating something that reflected the current pacing of time and movement around us. The fact that we were both confined to our own personal environments provided limitations to what we could film. One morning I woke up with light streaming across the room and I spent some time following its reflections, movements, the shapes and the shifts. Light is a useful reminder of time, but it made me think how that’s become much more disorientating, how interrupted routines have made it more difficult to make sense of time moving, or of us moving through it.”
“Alva’s version of the track represents a similar shift in pace, a slowing down: a reassessing.”
For his part, Tommy Perman offers:
“During lockdown we’d send each other short video clips of things we’d seen – testing ideas. I’d experiment with lots of different video manipulation and editing techniques and send things back to Su. Due to practical considerations I generally only recorded footage of a maximum of a minute long.”
“One evening I noticed a patch of light on the hall wall and set up a tripod and started the camera. It was close to bedtime and my kids had reached the wild animal stage so I became distracted chasing them around the house and forgot about the camera. I bumped into the tripod 15 minutes later and realised it was still recording – I quickly pressed stop to save on disk space.”
“The next morning I reviewed the footage and was so happy at what had been captured. Over the 15 minutes the sunlight moved across the wall with a surprising amount of variation and richness that I would have missed without this happy accident…”
Tune in now.
Join us on the ad-free creative social network Vero, as we get under the skin of global cultural happenings. Follow Clash Magazine as we skip merrily between clubs, concerts, interviews and photo shoots. Get backstage sneak peeks, exclusive content and access to Clash Live events and a true view into our world as the fun and games unfold.