Angel Olsen - "Tiniest Seed" & "Sweet Dreams"

If you’ve never heard the name Angel Olsen before, now is the perfect time to start paying attention. After releasing her much overlooked sophomore album, Half Way Home back in September, the Midwestern singer-songwriter has returned with two brand new music videos in support. The songs for which the visuals accompany are completely different from each other—”Tiniest Seed” is a tranquil acoustic folk song and “Sweet Dreams” is a psychedelic, electric guitar-driven garage rock song—but they do have one major thing in common: neither sound of this time period. The videos showcase this. Both of them were created the old way: they were shot on film cameras by Olsen and three other filmmakers and then the film was shipped back and forth between New York and Vienna, Austria until the final products seen above came to be. Read more on this process below in the joint statement issued by Olsen and her collaborators Randy Sterling Hunter, Ashley Connor and Zia Anger, and head over to Bathetic Records to purchase your copy of Haf Way Home.

The score was mailed back across the Atlantic and then interpreted using a hand-wound 16mm camera. Two rolls of film were shot in barns and fields, and in gorges and on piers in Upstate, New York. The beginning of the score called for a meiotic effect to be used in tandem with the song “Tiniest Seed.” The film was exposed and then rewound and re-exposed many times. Later in the score a more intuitive approach to shooting was the direction, as a reaction to the song “Sweet Dreams.” These images were collected with the foreknowledge that the film would be extensively manipulated in the darkroom. The film was mailed back to Vienna. An archaic homemade contact printer was used to create the final look and that film was hand-processed, and rinsed and repeated all in the same room in which the score began. The final version is the documentation of an epistolary-exchange lasting nearly a year. It is an attempt to sync the unsyncable and our experiment at reconciling the space between us. Every hand visible in the final film. A 16mm print available and recommended for screening purposes. This is the digital version.