Melodic cold wave outfit The Sea At Midnight is the project of Los Angeles songwriter Vince Grant. After overcoming intense hurdles in life, Grant has transformed into a Rumpelstiltskin of sonic healing, spinning gold out of intense darkness and creating beauty, compassion, and hope out of deep wells of pain. The Sea at Midnight entrances listeners with moody soundscapes spanning the gamut of aural bliss and morose introspection. Grant’s gravitas is well-earned and earnest, wrapping the track in a cocoon of emotion and poetry. The track brings to mind the psychedelic dream pop of Echo & the Bunnymen and The Cure, the post-punk sensibilities of The The and Love and Rockets, topped with a sprinkling of that ol’ Mazzy Star stardust.
Produced by Chris King of Cold Showers with drum programming by Brandon Pierce (Glaare), The Sea At Midnight’s eponymous, self-released debut album unleashes a captivating new single and accompanying video: Anything About You.
The video, the first animated video directed by Canadian artist Zach Fish, is a work of art in and of itself, but paired with Grant’s songwriting, it packs a wallop emotionally.
“I knew Anything About You was important the very first time I heard it,” says Fish. “For me, it conjured the terror of a newly discovered absence. It reminded me of approximately the second week of a new relationship, when one is struck by the sudden understanding that they were alone and now are not.
Fish and Grant discovered a mutual affinity for cyberpunk science fiction: in particular, the works of William Gibson.
“The singular element therein, in my experience, is the overlap between the visio-spatial, hallucinatory vector-fields of cyberspace and the gritty, hyperbolically human texture of the waking world,” Fish continues. “Much like the twin phosphate backbones of DNA, each serves as a counterpoint to the other, structuring the spiral code of the human condition. This was my conceptual guiding principle. There is a whiteboard next to my desk, and after deciding to take Vince up on his offer to do a music video, I quickly scrawled the words “Chamber With Vertical Cylinder Lights.” This simple concept seeded the narrative, inasmuch as one exists, for the video. The story grew of its own accord from that initial, spatial idea. I sincerely hope the character’s journey towards the mathematical dual of his soul’s graph strikes viewers as simultaneously mystifying and familiar.”
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