New music video, directed, filmed and edited by Stephen Wilkinson and Michael Robinson. Additional footage by Jared Pike and David Mowad.
Read more from Bibio and Michael Robinson about the process behind the making of the video:
Stephen Wilkinson (Bibio)
“Michael and I started a dialogue about working on this video back in 2012, way before I even shared the track with him. It was all about sharing keywords back then – vague, murky, impressionistic, lonely, tunnels, longing… The song has always been very visual for me, always revisiting the same imaginary places when I hear it. This is one of the reasons that it’s my favourite track off the album; I like to wander in my mind and music is a trigger for that. For this video we relied more on 30+ year old tube video cameras as opposed to film, choosing them for their vague pastel-like quality.
Most of the footage in this video was shot by myself and Michael was the chief editor, as well as contributing a lot of beautiful footage himself. I shot the majority of it in late summer and autumn 2013 in England and Wales. There’s one bird that flies out of a bush – that’s pretty much the only creature I videoed on the walk – as I wanted it to be a solitary experience, just the point of view of the walker and the surroundings. I also took a day trip to one of my favourite places on earth, Cwm Einion/Artists’ Valley in mid Wales. It was essential I went to that place; I’ve had some pretty profound moments there, and it was so nice to revisit.
For the ending, I wanted to capture a sense of drowning or just being submerged amongst aquatic life – this is something I knew I wanted in the early stages of our dialogue. I approached this by videoing daphnia (water fleas) with a macro lens as well as dangling an underwater camera in a stagnant pond full of algae, leaf debris and more water fleas. But the whole video really came to life when Michael worked his magic on layering it and texturising it and intertwining it with lots of gorgeous semi-abstract organic looking footage he shot his side of the pond, mostly in Pennsylvania. He’s so much more advanced at editing than me, and he’s capable of achieving what I want to see. This video is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to my dreams or imagination; it’s the closest I’ve got to translating vagueness into a viewable form.”
Michael Robinson
“When Stephen and I first worked together back on ‘Excuses’, we found it necessary to communicate in a way that was like creating a new language, to name the visual bits that were discovered along the way. Since then we’ve shared visual discoveries, and each of us had a good idea on what was appropriate for this track.
Earlier last year I had shared with Stephen a clip that was shot low-light in VHS, where the detail was very subdued on the raw footage. In lifting the images in post with gamma and level adjustments, there was something beautiful in the way it appeared, it felt very figment-like. But also to compare a sonic treatment – it felt almost bit-crushed, in the way the noise is broken up, and buried artifacts were revealed. From this reference Stephen shot his vocal take in low light, with a single candle used as source for a soft ambient cast.
To me the video for ‘Dye The Water Green’ held a certain identifiable quality linked with a sense of possibility and exploration – when there is a new place to go, another bend around the corner to uncover, or a different vista coming into view.“