- 2022-11-23
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MUSIC
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Donate to support families affected by the crisis in Ukraine ➔ Woodkid Drops New Music Video for “Reactor”
Back in 2020, French music video director and singer-songwriter Yoann Lemoine, aka Woodkid released his sophomore album “S16”.
It is his first album in seven years and comprises 11-track.
Two years later, he premiered a new music video for “Reactor” directed by Saad Moosajee from the album on November 22, 2022.
The song was written by Woodkid and Ryan Lott. Produced by Woodkid, Ryan Lott and Tanguy Destable.
The track features Suginami Junior Chorus in Japan.
Woodkid said of the song in an interview with METAL in 2020, “Using the Suginami Junior Chorus in the record was specifically the idea of making two worlds collide in one song. The first [world] is the American minimalism movement, with people like Philip Glass or Steve Reich, who I worship. But also another culture, my passion for certain Japanese identities: Akira, Ghost in the Shell, or the Final Fantasy series. All of these influences seem like worlds apart, but I thought I could see a connection between them, so I brought them together in one song.”- He continued, “And also, the idea of having children's voices, which I cast very specifically. I wanted a children's (a girls') choir but I didn't want it to sound like a TV commercial. These girls specifically [from the Suginami Junior Chorus], with that timbre and way of writing music, sound exactly the way I wanted – ambiguous. Something that sounds utopic and dystopic at the same time. You never know if it's a positive or a negative force. It feels more like an omniscient force that commands. I wanted them to finish S16 as well; I didn't want to finish it. The last words of the album are from a younger generation of kids.”
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He said of the album, “S16 is the periodic element sulphur, 16 being the atomic charge. When I worked on the environment of the record, I knew there was something industrial about it – sonically and visually – but I didn’t quite know what it was, so I visited a lot of places. I went to nuclear power plants, oil platforms, coal mines and mass industrial complexes. And I realised at some point it was something about sulphur.”
He continued, “I saw these pyramids of sulphur in Alberta, Canada, and there was something striking about them. I thought it was interesting because it has a symbolic resonance. The more I built around the lexical theory of the record and songs, sounds and visuals, I realised that sulphur could embody everything that I wanted to talk about. It's an element that's fundamental to life – like hydrogen, carbon and oxygen –, and it's also used in the industry as a fertiliser. There's an idea of life behind that.”
He added, “But it's also one of the main components of mustard gas, which is one of the grossest weapons humans have made. In alchemy, too, it's the symbol of the devil. So there's a bit of ambiguity, but also a heavy symbolism I could attach myself to when I made the narrative.”
Photo by Collier Schorr - source : YouTube
