Photo: Sylvestre Nonique-Desvergnes

Last month Eric Chenaux announced the release of his first album in four years, Say Laura, and enticed us with the beguiling title track. Now he is offering an accompanying video for the single, directed by filmmaker and longtime collaborator Eric Cadzyn. Chenaux wrote a few words about the song and the video:

“Say Laura is the sixteenth music video from Eric Cadzyn and I.
Sweet 16!
When I think about this group of work I think about the chance I get to encounter
the way a dear friend listens.
And how he modulates that listening into a problem.
A problem in the classic sense.
The problem being the form of music video.
And we both take on that form unapologetically.
I know they are a far cry from Beyoncé and Jay Z busting a move in the Louvre.
We are wondering how to encounter this form or propose an encounter with this form
where the image and the song can co-inhabit a space and a time without hierarchy.
Where the image and sound can share a space (perhaps differently) without short-circuiting the other. Where we get to see and hear without one sense exercising control over the other.
Most of the videos we have made (save for a couple) are one non-edited shot.
Say Laura takes a distinctively different approach, using photos (for the most part).

This is a performance video and maybe a sister video to Wild Moon,
which is a video of the performer listening and quietly singing along and dancing.
This is a video of the performer lip-syncing (different than quietly singing along, I don’t know how it is different but it is different. A different zone).
The performer closes its eyes when it is not singing (to listen to the guitar, I imagine, without having to engage with the camera).
In the stillness of the photos we see the gestures, the shapes that the mouth makes to make the different sounds.
A dance of skin, orifice (filter), teeth, tongue, lips, jaw and well, a lot of hair!
The slits, the orifices, the bends in the skin.
The humour of the grotesque of the mouth abstracted and often without context to the surrounding face. The video is a performance of the song and this is a performance video.
There is text coming out of the song onto the screen, out of sync and in sync.
There are pulses in the video: pulsing text, pulsing image, pulsing screen, flashing the beat of the song. And the video performs “Say Laura”.

Watch the video for ‘Say Laura’ below and watch out for the album release on February 19th through Constellation and Murailles Music.