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Lokki (aka Drew MacFarlane, Glass Animals) Shares New Video For ‘High’

November 2, 2018

Laura Kelly

Lokki

Releases New Video for ‘High’

 

Lokki  releases the video for his latest single ‘High’ which is out now as a split single alongside ‘On Our Own’ via Wolf Tone (The Horrors, Rosie Lowe). It’s the first new music from Lokki – the solo project of Glass Animals’ Drew MacFarlane – since his debut EP ‘Cirrhi’ which arrived earlier this year. Following solo shows across 2018, the new release will be followed by soon-to-be-announced live dates from Drew. Watch the new video for ‘High’ here and stream ‘High/On Our Own’ here.

Sprung from writing sessions at his flat in leafy South London, the deliciously off-beat pop of ‘High’ finds Drew fleshing out the nocturnal vulnerability which characterised so much of the gauzy ‘Cirrhi’ EP. Picking at that disconnect between the individual & collective experience, ’High’ refracts a nervy questioning of identity through MacFarlane’s love for classical composition.

The track arrives via a stop motion video which animator Tayo Kopfer filmed with Drew in the quieter corners of a London arts centre. Created via a painstaking process during which Kopfer added hand-drawn illustrations to thousands of stills from the resulting footage (before stitching the whole thing back together), the video intersects with the track’s acceptance of imperfection and temporality. Says Drew of the video; “A big part of the song is about zooming way out, seeing your life (and other peoples’ lives) fast forwarded, a bit like a time lapse. The paint moving across the screen plays with everything in the video, including me, mirroring how all of our actions ripple out into the world, even though we don’t always see it.”

Whilst both ‘High’ and ‘On Our Own’ began life as arrangements for a string quartet, they bear out a refreshingly on-the-fly approach to creating new music. “I think it’s good to allow songs to take their course and become what they’re supposed to be says Drew, “Rather than imposing order from the outside. I think there’s definitely a way of looking at it which is ‘what does the song need?’ rather than ‘what do I want?’. It’s deciding at what point in a song’s evolution you choose to record it, to add lyrics. It’s about letting things unfold”.

Time at uni spent studying composition also budded Drew’s fascination with the interplay between lyrics and the music freighting them. “The thing that really struck me, especially with choral music” says Drew; “Is you often have these texts which stay constant throughout different musical eras, but then there’s hundreds of composers through the centuries who have completely different ways of expressing that core set of words.” This affinity for exploring new means to unfold & examine immutable themes drives ‘On Our Own’, whose lush, upwards circling orchestral pop belies its charting of the end stages of a relationship. “On the one hand, I was trying to write something which sounded a bit more ‘warm’. I wanted to have this sense of someone expressing warmth to another, whilst essentially saying, this is over.” No mean feat, but as the track’s shuffling lilt unfolds around the lush string arrangements which dominated its early iterations, you sense MacFarlane has succeeded in bringing real tenderness to fraught territory.

With forthcoming, to-be-announced Lokki live shows set to mirror Drew’s laissez faire approach with a constantly-evolving line-up of musicians combining scored arrangements with improvisation, Lokki’s next steps look to be pleasingly unpredictable. ‘High / On Our Own’ arrives with the feeling of an artist stepping out of the shadows and blinkingly into daylight – whilst the world continues to be an increasingly uncertain and unsettling place to be, in MacFarlane’s hands it has never sounded quite so full of technicolour possibility.

https://www.lokkimusic.com/

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