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Jun 29, 2018 By Christopher Roberts Charlotte Gainsbourg

French singer/actress Charlotte Gainsbourg released a new album, Rest, late last year via Because Music. (It was our Album of the Week and was #15 in our Top 100 Albums of 2017 list.) Now she has shared a video for “Sylvia Says.” Gainsbourg directed the video herself. It’s a surreal affair that features people collapsing in the street in slow motion, Gainsbourg hanging out at a landfill, and the singer on a floating chair of disco balls. It doesn’t make much sense, but is fun to look at (which could be said about a lot of music videos). Watch it below via Pitchfork.

The lyrics to the song reference Sylvia Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song.” A press release explains the video as such: “In the music video, the visuals echo Plath and Gainsbourg’s abilities to mine huge themes from something as small as a blink of an eye, and similarly portray the unruly powers of subjectivity. Glassy winter sunlight shines on a pedestrian-packed city street scene, as Gainsbourg walks toward the crowd. The video first appears to be a slice-of-life view of New York City as the workday lets out and people begin their commutes-an already odd everyday experience, wholly isolated yet wholly public. But it quickly becomes unbound from visible reality, as we delve into a wild, more subconscious experience of the everyday onslaught of lives that pass by us in the street. Scenes are shot at extreme speeds on a Phantom camera, and the editing’s rhythmic jolts disorient any notion of normalcy, bringing about an escalating of surreal imagery. A walk among strangers in the middle of New York can also, obviously, be a nap in a cloud of disco balls.”

Previously Gainsbourg shared a self-directed video for Rest‘s title track, which was co-written and produced by Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (it was one of our Songs of the Week), as well as a self-directed video for “Deadly Valentine” that co-starred Dev Hynes, aka Blood Orange, and featured her two daughters playing younger versions of Gainsbourg (it was our #1 Song of the Week). Then she shared another song from the album, “Ring-a-Ring O’ Roses,” which is partially a play off the classic playground nursery rhyme, as well as a self-directed video for the song. Then there was a self-directed video for “Lying With You” in which she visits the home of her late father, the legendary musician Serge Gainsbourg, as well as a self-directed video for “Les Oxalis.” And then there was a self-directed video for “I’m a Lie.” She also shared a remix of “Ring-a-Ring O’ Roses” by SebastiAn. She also released the Sylvia Says Remixes EP.

Rest also features collaborations with Paul McCartney (who composed and wrote the album’s “Songbird in a Cage”), Owen Pallett, and Connan Mockasin. While “Rest” was produced by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, the rest of Rest was produced by SebastiAn (Frank Ocean, Kavinsky).

The album is the follow-up to 2006’s 5:55 (a collaboration with Air, Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, and The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon) and 2009’s IRM (a collaboration with Beck). Unlike those albums, for Rest Gainsbourg wrote the lyrics herself.

Read our 2010 interview with Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Read our recent interview with Charlotte Gainsbourg on Rest.

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