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Amber Arcades

Watch: Amber Arcades “Cant’ Say That We Tried” Video

Apr 26, 2017

Today, ahead of the forthcoming release of her Cannonball EP, out June 2nd on Heavenly Recordings, Dutch musician Amber Arcades shared the dreamy video for one of the tracks - “Can’t Say That We Tried”, directed by Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan. The frayed innocence of De Graaf’s voice rises over slow building organs to a finale of grandeur. It’s an absorbing listen and video. Check it out below.

It’s interesting how the video of “Can’t Say That We Tried” is aquatic in imagery, since the underwater organs that bend through the tune call to mind Brian Eno’s “Deep Blue Day” the incredible ambient piece forever linked to Ewan McGreggor diving into a toilet bowl to retrieve his suppositories in Trainspotting and winding up in a seaworld. Just an observation…

Songwriter Annelotte De Graaf explains the serendipitous way their collaboration came together for this video: “Sometimes when I’m bored I just randomly click when I get a notification that someone likes my page. Like a kind of market research I tell myself cos I can’t accept that maybe I’m just a creepy internet stalker yet. This one day I clicked and I came on the Facebook profile of this guy Don and he had a link to his Vimeo page and since I was really bored I clicked further on that and then I saw he made some pretty amazing stuff. I especially liked this video he had made of an aquarium with dreamy fish. The week after my label guy told me it would be good to have a video for this song and I just thought about this fishy video. Like how the fish just float around, not knowing that there is this whole world outside of this aquarium, it’s beautiful but also kind of sad, which is how I feel about this song. So I asked Don if he’d be into making an edit of his material to fit the song and shot some extra footage of me singing the tune to mix up with it. Like Sinead O’Connor vids kinda. I love how it all turned out and I love how the whole thing was kind of born out of a coincidence, like me clicking that notification that time. The magic of this internet world.”

A press statement describes the upcoming Cannonball EP: “The Cannonball EP opens with Amber Arcades’ reworking of the classic Nick Drake cut “Which Will” (from his seminal 1972 album Pink Moon) highlighting the band’s characteristic Krautrock-infused haze and – furthermore – Annelotte de Graaf’s reverence for an artist she truly admires. “It Changes” follows, possibly Amber Arcades’ most irresistible and compelling pop single to date. Furthermore, the EP will feature three brand new tracks in the form of “Can’t Say That We Tried”, “Wouldn’t Even Know’”(featuring Bill Ryder-Jones on vocals) and the title track, “Cannonball”.

About the EP as a whole de Graaf beams: “I’m so happy to be releasing these tunes. We had two days off in New York on our tour last September and we recorded them in that time. I’ve thought about postponing their release and waiting till I have more songs to make it into a full record, but I actually feel like they fit together wonderfully as an EP and am glad they get to be out there in this form.”