You’ll remember Juan Tigre from 2020, when we wrote about his rollickingly fast paced track, ‘Dream Catcher’, from the EP of the same name. Juan Tigre returns with his new single and video, ‘Sink In’, from his ambient instrumental album, ‘Azúl Arriba, Blue Below’, out on Bubble Bath Records.
The video for ‘Sink In’ opens with Juan Tigre playing guitar, set against a billowing, fluid blue background. We are drawn into the hole of his guitar – we literally “sink in” – and are transported into a mystical realm.
At first it appears we are surrounded by fireflies, but this soon reveals itself to be bubbles, then what seems to be rain falling onto a lake.
Just as suddenly – the whole track is just over 2 and a half minutes long, so it is very sudden – we re-emerge from the hole, through Juan’s strumming fingers, as the video credits roll by.
All while we are lost in the clip, Juan Tigre’s instrumentals take on an almost psychedelic feel, which works perfectly in conjunction with the visuals. Juan himself is ever-present; he reappears at the 1 minute 30 mark, shadowy, and barely perceptible in the midnight blue of the rippling screen, but he is there.
While there are no vocals, towards the end there are what sound like whispering voices; it’s not of course, but it’s testament to the talent of this artist that he can make his guitar sound that way.
Juan Tigre described the process of making the music video for ‘Sink In’:
With the video for “Sink In” I wanted to create a surreal underwater world that visually flows along with the inherent motion presented in the song. I spoke with Bruno Doria, the filmmaker, about what we could do to make that happen and we decided upon using natural video effects. The glowing water ripples that appear in the center of the guitar soundhole and later takeover the screen are actually cymatic images. We poured vodka and food coloring onto a speaker cone and played the song through the speaker, causing the vodka to morph and ripple to the frequencies of the music. Cymatics have been a point of interest for me over the past few years and have given a concrete scientific image to sound frequencies that have deepened my relationship to music. The droplets and bubbles were created using oil, water and alka seltzer tablets in a fishbowl, then filmed with a microscopic probe camera lens so that the viewer could feel as if they were inside the rolling water. All of these ideas were employed in an effort to make the viewer feel the wateriness of the song on a visceral level, and my hope is that somewhere someone gets inspired by the connection of the visualization of sound alongside its natural audio counterpart. – Juan Tigre
‘Azúl Arriba, Blue Below’ is out today. Find out more about Juan Tigre and his music via his Linktree.
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