Previously to making music, Daniela Weinmann, the singer of pop duo Odd Beholder, worked as a journalist and conceptual artist. Her new single Landscape Escape indeed comes across like a trojan horse for these two disciplines.
For the music video, she hooked up with the Berlin filmmaker duo Joscha Kirchknopf and Andrea Grambow—not a bad choice, considering that they describe their work as “Fact fucks fiction”. And from there on things took their own course…
They went to Azerbaijan where they would shoot in oil fields, with local families and with the Azerbaijan Social & Modern Dance Association. The result is not your ordinary music video but a sensitive insight into the people and culture of Azerbaijan. “I find it interesting that my lyrics got translated into Azeri”, Weinmann told WITNESS THIS. “I wonder how people in the region relate to the song.” Unpredictedly, their video gained sad actuality because of the new developments in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Check out the video below, fully shot on location, and witness the unpretentious beauty of Azerbaijan.
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“In every valley of the earth, there are people going about their everyday life. They work, they cook, they eat, they fall in love, they dance, they give birth to children, they bury their dead.”
–Daniela of Odd Beholder
Here’s some behind-the-scenes info from Daniela:
“When I thought of ‘Landscape Escape’ I imagined an impressive landscape and the exploitation of it. The pictures of oil fields in Azerbaijan come close to that vision.
To us, the Lezginka dance looks like a mixture between breakdance and ballet. I personally wasn’t on the set, but if I understood it right, some of the ideas in the shoot were the ideas of the dancers. There was an exchange of views about aesthetics.
For me, the fact that they glance into the camera makes the role of the beholder reciprocal: We watch them, but they watch us, too. The subtitles raise the question who the beholder of the video is, at least, that’s how I read them. I understand it as a reference to our band name Odd Beholder.”
Odd Beholder’s first EP is due spring 2016. Follow Odd Beholder on facebook | Instagram.
