Having previously collaborated with Steve Gunn, Mary Lattimore and Xabier Erkizia, Basque multi-instrumentalist Elena Setién released her new album Moonlit Reveries last month on Thrill Jockey, a collaboration with Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche.
Today, she shared a video for her single “Asking,” directed by Catalina Giordano. The video was filmed in the ancient cave systems of the Basque Country, which lends a disorientating effect to that track which she co-wrote with Kotche. The watery percussion and Setién’s striking vocals add an attractive edginess to this sophisticated arrangement that has an improvisational energy that makes the duo sound like they’ve been making music for years.
Setién elaborates on the track and video: “When thinking about “Asking” and its lyrics, I immediately go back to the time when Homo Sapiens and the Neanderthals co-existed. They even mixed and gave rise to hybrid species, and there’s supposed to be some amount of Neanderthal in our DNA. What interested me was the origin of symbolic thinking and art. We know now that the Neanderthals had quite a bit of symbolic thinking, just as the Homo Sapiens did, and produced works of what could be called proto-art. And in this frame of mind, Argentinian video artist Catalina Giordano and I started having conversations about the music video. The result is a somehow surrealistic performance inside a beautiful cave in the Basque Country. Combining our own symbolic thinking and imagining with the cave surroundings, which for me are the main character of the video.”
Elena Setién’s Moonlit Reveries is out now, and she plays San Sebastian, ES at Dabadaba on February 27th, following sets at various European jazz festivals.
Bandcamp: https://elenasetien.bandcamp.com/album/moonlit-reveries