Your Source for NPR News & Music
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

First Watch: J.Viewz, 'About The Sea'

Brooklyn-based electronic-music producer Jonathan Dagan, a.k.a. J.Viewz, writes songs that whirl and clatter like tiny Rube Goldberg devices. So it's only reasonable that his videos might function the same way. Witness "About the Sea," in which small green squares reveal a series of patterns before giving way to gorgeous animated nature scenes.

As J.Viewz' sweet, busy song bustles along, the animation of Clement Picon sets up a portrait of nature in motion — in only a few minutes, he tells a story of interconnectedness, using the travels of a deer, a stick, a water droplet and more to convey the evolution and motion of all things. It's a lovely trick, not to mention a perfectly vivid companion piece to J.Viewz's song.

Here's director and animator Clement Picon:

"Working on 'About the Sea' proved to be a stimulating creative process. It was an atypical experience in that the music kept evolving as the video was being put together. It was quite enjoyable to observe the song's fine-tuning process as it echoed the progression of my own work on the video."

And here's J.Viewz himself:

"'About the Sea' was the last song I recorded for Rivers and Homes. The whole album-making process was opened to fans and funded by them, so I had a strong 'end of journey' feel when writing and producing it. I started the song as a soundtrack based on Clement's video, which was originally made for the first song I recorded for this album, 'Come Back Down,' so that was like coming full circle.

"I used many elements from the title song which opens the album, and based the song on exactly the same chords. As in every J.Viewz track with my own vocals on it, I recorded a demo take in order to find a different vocalist, and thought it sounded nice, so I left it there.

"I guess the song is about meeting your everyday people 'outside of time,' and connecting on a deeper level. I felt a huge nostalgic kind of love the whole time I worked on this song, and having Clement's images while I worked pointed me to a very precise, kind of comforting sentiment."

J. Viewz's latest album, Rivers and Homes, is out now.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)
Related Stories