Los Angeles-based songwriter Swimming Bell, the musical project of Katie Schottland, has released a surreal new music video for “95 At Night,” a standout track from her latest EP, Somnia. Directed by Christopher Good (Mitski, Kevin Morby), the video is a hypnotic visual journey that draws heavily on Maya Deren’s seminal 1943 experimental film, Meshes of the Afternoon, which has been subtitled as “The Dizzying Reality of Dreams”, a phrase that envelopes this work perfectly.
The video mirrors the song’s dreamy quality, a track Schottland describes as “a memory of life before I moved to California.” Good translates this nostalgic and ethereal feeling into a series of dream-logic vignettes. We see Schottland repeatedly having her song-writing disrupted, and even eating meals becomes a surrealist experience where nothing is quite what it seems.
The director’s choice to shoot in his home state of Kansas adds a layer of rustic charm to the video’s absurdity. “I thought the song was really dreamy, so I thought a dreamy video would be good to make,” Good explains. His admiration for Deren’s work shines through in the video’s disorienting yet compelling visual language.
Schottland, who flew to Kansas for the shoot, embraced the collaborative spirit. “I was glad to give him complete control to come up with the concept knowing that we both like absurdity,” she says. The result is a perfect marriage of sound and vision, a captivating and fittingly dream-like accompaniment to a song from her Somnia release, an EP designed to evoke the sensation of “sinking into water.”