Folk duo Gawain and the Green Knight, featuring Alexia Antoniou and her partner Mike O’Malley, have just released their EP A Sleeping Place, the title of which is inspired by the etymology of the Greek word for cemetery…the EP being “a meditation on mortality vs. immortality”. Dark and sombre as that may sound, the EP track “The Dressmaker”, is a reflection on the quiet triumphs that make up a life, the video for which we have the pleasure of premiering today. It is one of the album’s most energetic offerings and is their first “stomp-and holler” song. The video features the incredible embroidery work of their friend Yoshie Kawakami, the creation of which is quite mesmerising to watch. They shared the following on the song and video:
Alexia: “The Dressmaker” is my first breakup song (though the breakup it describes takes place roughly 130 years before I’d ever even dated anybody!) I began writing the song with just the line “all of your clothes smell like me and the children” repeating in my head again and again- which was weird because it certainly didn’t apply to me or my non-existent children. That line ended up morphing into the story of a woman realizing- after her husband walks out on their family- that she hasn’t really gotten the chance to figure out who she is yet. Which is a feeling I absolutely related to at the end of some of my long-term relationships- that even in the grief, there’s this excitement at getting just a little bit closer to yourself and who you’re going to be.
Mike: Our first stomp-and-holler song! I wanted to elevate the narrator’s frustration to proper, righteous anger in spots, which accounts for the occasional rowdiness. Toward the end is an arpeggio happening at three different speeds in four different registers, shared by the piano, clarinet, and flute. They lace together like so many threads, echoing the lyrics. I’d hoped to express the triumph of the narrator’s self-salvation through the repetitive act of sewing.
Alexia: For the video, we definitely wanted to feature the act of sewing. We wanted to focus more on the beauty of the process of sewing, rather than the beauty of the end result- it felt like a way to underscore the narrator, who is still in the process of discovering herself. There’s also something surprisingly aggressive about sewing (all that stabbing with a needle!) that felt appropriately cathartic for a breakup song! Once we had this visual in mind, we knew immediately we wanted to work with a friend of mine, Yoshie Kawakami, who is an incredible artist across so many mediums but in particular does the most intricate, breathtaking embroidery work. She created this gorgeous interpretation of the dressmaker for the video. To me, watching the sped-up footage of Yoshie’s hands zooming around the fabric and leaving behind these beautiful trails of color and beads brought the idea of “The Dressmaker” to life so much more fully than the song alone.
This is one you will struggle to sit still to…
Enjoy!
A Sleeping Place is our now and available here: https://smarturl.it/ASleepingPlace
Website: https://www.gawainandthegreenknightband.com/
Photo Credit: Charis Storms