Artist: Dana Sipos
Hometown: Hamilton, ON (currently residing in Victoria, BC)
Song: “Breathing Barrel”
Album: The Astral Plane
Release Date: June 25, 2021
Label: Roaring Girl Records
In Their Words: “‘Breathing Barrel’ is ultimately a meditation on being at peace with the present moment. Written immediately upon returning home to the city from a music residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, deep in the foothills of the Rockies, this song is an attempt to integrate a very powerful experience into the more mundane, everyday life. I was trying to trick or convince myself to ‘be July in the wintertime’ — ‘July’ being the Banff Centre in the middle of a bleak Toronto winter, trying to buoy myself and bring back that feeling of abundance and ripe possibility. So in visiting many landscapes, changing seasons, and fleeting moments while focusing on staying present, ‘Breathing Barrel’ turned into a bit of a dreamscape.
“The video was created by Victoria musician Trevor Lang, with dozens of high-resolution scans of vintage magazine cutouts, finely tuned to line up with the rhythm of the song. The pairing of vintage magazine cutouts with the text made to look as though it was coloured in by hand and was intended to mirror the warm and analog textural quality of the recording, the feeling of paper and pencil. The slightly unusual frame rate of this video (eight frames-per-second as opposed to the typical stop-motion animation of either six or 12 frames-per-second) was intended to give the video a familiar but unique rhythm akin to the drum machine featured throughout the song.” — Dana Sipos
Photo credit: Chris Dufour
