The Chicago folksinger Angel Olsen released one of last year’s great sleeper albums in Half Way Home — an LP that some of us are only just starting to appreciate now. And now she’s teamed up with her friends Sterling Hunter, Ashley Connor, and Zia Anger to make a pair of dizzily evocative new videos, for the Half Way Home track “Tiniest Seed” and the rockabilly-leaning new song “Sweet Dreams.” Watch the “Tiniest Seed” video and read the four directors’ statement about the two clips below.

The score was mailed back across the Atlantic and then interpreted using a hand-wound 16mm camera. Two rolls of film were shot in barns and fields, and in gorges and on piers in Upstate, New York. The beginning of the score called for a meiotic effect to be used in tandem with the song “Tiniest Seed.” The film was exposed and then rewound and re-exposed many times. Later in the score a more intuitive approach to shooting was the direction, as a reaction to the song “Sweet Dreams.” These images were collected with the foreknowledge that the film would be extensively manipulated in the darkroom. The film was mailed back to Vienna. An archaic homemade contact printer was used to create the final look and that film was hand-processed, and rinsed and repeated all in the same room in which the score began. The final version is the documentation of an epistolary-exchange lasting nearly a year. It is an attempt to sync the unsyncable and our experiment at reconciling the space between us. Every hand visible in the final film. A 16mm print available and recommended for screening purposes. This is the digital version.

(via NPR)

Half Way Home is out now on Bathetic. Watch “Sweet Dreams” here.