MICHAELBRAILEY’s ‘waters of love’ romanticizes the post-digital through lo-fi pop psychoacoustics

, 20 May 2020
video

MICHAELBRAILEY is releasing EP the broken heart is more than a metaphor it is terraforming in action via Astral Plane Recordings on May 29, with video ‘waters of love’ (co-produced alongside Seattle’s Kid Smpl) premiering on AQNB today. The Manchester and Hamburg-based artist’s EP follows a series of self-released collaborative vocal covers with Emily Glass and ssaliva, as well as many deconstructed club edits.

While MICHAELBRAILEY has often relied on maximalist pop and dance motifs throughout their discography, this latest EP features a more vulnerable, nuanced incorporation of these stylings, romanticizing the post-digital through disassociating various psychoacoustic effects.

The video for ‘waters of love’ conjures a high drama out of an otherwise forgiving and hypnagogic ambient score. Oscillating between melancholic and pleading dispositions, the artist—cloaked in a black garb—tosses between two strobing panels. The subtitles, “I press them deep into the soil of our love,” appear as the song bridges into swaths of synthesized ambience. Appearing again—this time fashioned in a monster costume—the artist engages in a dialogue as the video suddenly flashes back to the cloaked figure. As the video warps both character’s bodies into abstraction, the final lyrics appear:

I wonder if he feels it.
The waters of my love.**

MICHAELBRAILEY’s the broken heart is more than a metaphor it is terraforming in action EP is out via Astral Plane Recordings on May 29, 2020.