As the August 30th release of the highly anticipated ‘Lagos Paris London’ EP draws near, Yannis & The Yaw featuring Tony Allen now unveil the new video for ‘Rain Can’t Reach Us’. Just as the music finds the electrifying common thread between Yannis Philippakis and Tony Allen’s shared sonic influences, the video is the result of finding harmony between AI tech and human creativity.

The use of AI in creative media is a controversial topic: there are occasions in which it is used as a shortcut to human endeavour, and others in which it entirely bypasses individual creativity altogether. Yet regular Yannis and Foals visual collaborator Kit Monteith’s imagined a concept that would blur the perceived boundaries between AI generated visuals with the character and preciseness that only comes with a personal touch.

The resulting video plays to the dystopian, post-apocalyptic aura of Yannis’s ‘Rain Can’t Reach Us’ lyrics. While it initially uses the conventional visual language of the hyperlapse to depict a hectic if ordinary day in central London, its tone soon shifts. AI depicts the world around Yannis as being in a cyclone of flux, regularly fading to burning embers before once again being reborn in often surprising ways. But to elevate the visual to its full potential, Kit had to individual manipulate every single frame to make it a cohesive experience. And to describe that as a Herculean challenge isn’t an overstatement – the five-minute video consists of over 13,000 individual frames.

Kit Monteith outlines the process and his inspiration behind the video:

“The video came about from short visual experiments I’d created for the earlier tracks from the EP. Yannis and I liked the idea of trying to show the world around him shifting and changing in strange ways, which linked to the lyrical themes, so I started to develop the technique that we’ve now come to call AI Stop Motion. The visual effect involves the individual manipulation of every single frame, of which there are 25 per second, so it’s a very labour intensive process. I soon discovered that the pace of change registered by the eye seemed to connect with Tony Allen’s style of drumming; all the ghost notes and extra accents in his style were able to be picked out by the visual process and it was a wonderful way to highlight his playing and presence.

For ‘Rain Can’t Reach Us’ we decided to embark on the most ambitious use of my technique yet and use it to symbolise potential futures for London, with desert sands rising up to engulf buildings and storm clouds raging in the skies above the city. Another part of the process for this video was to link the AI Stop Motion technique with the use of Hyperlapses. We’re all used to seeing cameras capturing days or weeks go by in a few seconds ever since timelapses have become a standard part of our visual culture so I thought it could be a perfect way to push the feeling that the changes I constructed in the AI were happening across actual time, perhaps over months, years or even decades: cities rising out of a desert before burning to the ground only to be replaced by floods and storms or car parks turning into scrap yards and wasting away into a deserted landscape.

Within these imaginings of possible futures for our cities the irony of using a form of AI to visualise their destruction felt interesting to me. So much technology feels like it’s being co-opted to be used in ways that dont feel beneficial to us, I believe that artists and musicians must try to redress this balance whenever possible. The themes that Yannis explores on the EP seemed to be the perfect foundation for me to do so in the ‘Rain Can’t Reach Us’ video.”

‘Rain Can’t Reach Us’ adds to the imaginative visual flair that complements the Yannis & The Yaw project after Kit’s art installation project for ‘Walk Through Fire’.

The five-track ‘Lagos Paris London’ is available to pre-order / pre-save HERE and will be released via Transgressive Records.

Yannis recently revealed details of the Yannis & The Yaw live band, which aims to capture the flavour of Tony Allen’s irrepressible spirit with the help of some of his most trusted collaborators. It includes Tony’s producers Vincent Taurelle (keys, also a previous touring member of Air) and Vincent Taeger (drums, Poni Hoax), both of whom also perform on the ‘Lagos Paris London’ EP, as well as Dave Okumu (guitar, The Invisible, who also worked extensively with Tony on the Joan As Police Woman album ‘The Solution Is Restless’) and Seye Adelekan (bass, Gorillaz). Dave Okumu and Vincent Taurelle also joined Yannis during his late night party jam sessions ‘MILK.’ in 2018.

Yannis will celebrate the release of the EP with in-store signing sessions in Oxford and London before taking the band on a select run of shows. Limited remaining tickets for the events below are available HERE:

N-STORE SIGNING SESSIONS
August 30th – Oxford, Truck Store
September 2nd – London, Rough Trade East

SEPTEMBER – HEADLINE SHOWS
7th – Stekene, Crammerock Festival
10th – Amsterdam, Paradiso
11th – Paris, La Cigale
13th – London, KOKO (SOLD OUT)