Two new videos by SW + Santiago Mostyn

, 4 August 2015
Earlier this year aqnb shared a mix, SWAQNB, by Stockholm-based producers Susanna Jablonski and William Rickman of SW, along with a short interview expounding on the importance of the visual element to their sound work and collaborations with fellow artist Santiago Mostyn. Now, Mostyn and Jablonski co-edit and conceptualise what they call a couple of ‘dance videos’ constructed from found footage and exploring what the bodies within them are allowed, or not allowed, to do.

 

The video to accompany ‘Beats for Babes’, released as part of SW’s  SLOW WAVE EP last year, features  Jab Molassie, or ‘Blue Devils’, from the Paramin neighbourhood near Port­-of-­Spain in Trinidad where Mostyn grew up. According to the artists, these groups “come down out of the hills every carnival to
make a show of scaring onlookers and other revellers.” The tradition, they say, is one that’s deeply embedded in the country’s slave history:

“The neighborhood they come from is one of the more dangerous in town. The threat that these guys carry is real, even though it’s performed. That these slave descendants allow themselves to become devils once a year, and reenact their history with all the fear and joy it contains, makes for a meaningful analog with the emotion in the track.”

The same goes for the video for ‘Hellis’, first dropped in audio on the SW Soundcloud in April this year:

“There’s a standing idea of what an enemy’s body looks like and what it should do: in this case it’s Pakistani police, and they’re supposed to be marching. But that these bodies break out of our preconception of them, of what their place and their threat is supposed to be, was a revelation for us when we cut the images to this track named after one of our best friends, the happiest anarcho-­club-­kid dancer in Stockholm. The point being that, with both of these videos, the dancing itself is political.” **

Header image: Susanna Jablonski + Santiago Mostyn, ‘Beats for Babes’ video still.