Today the Toronto musician Luka Kuplowsky dropped the beautiful music video for How Can I Possibly Sleep When There Is Music which features his backing members who are The Ryōkan Band.
The leading single is taken from the upcoming double album called How Can I Possibly Sleep When There is Music which comes out on May 31, 2024 via Next Door Records.
A beautiful and intimate tune.
About the track by Luka:
“How Can I Possibly Sleep When There is Music (a response to Ryōkan Taigu)”, which features vocalist Felicity Williams and flutist Anh Phoung, reflects on Ryōkan Taigu 良寛大愚, a Soto Zen Buddhist monk. Quiet, spirited, generous. A hermit whose masterful poetry and calligraphy was an extension of his deep love of nature and playful attitude towards life. Stirred by Ryōkan’s poem and its restless, joyful sentiment, the song carries forth as a response and conversation across centuries.
Kuplowsky adds, “Felicity overtaking the vocal melody at the end and reacting to Anh’s flute sets up a framework for the album; a trading forth and conversation between voices and sounds. How special to be in a world so animated by a curiosity and love of sound. And to dance and move to it! How can one even sleep!”
The song arrives with a video directed and edited by Kuplowsky. “With every blurred hazy cellphone moon we confront technology’s failure to render the moon’s beauty,” he explains. “Even Ryōkan, a half century before the camera, likely felt how poetry fails in this pursuit as well. Perhaps the moon’s allure is not visual or speakable at all? Perhaps it registers in the soul…as music! Who knows! This video accepts that failure, playfully superimposing dancing celestial bodies captured with my camera and setting them against the expressive rush of a repurposed 16mm collage of fabric paint, cut-up film negative, stenciled marker and scratching. It’s a video that suddenly arose and came together quite serendipitously.
“The collage was made collaboratively with Noncedo Khumalo, Franci Duran, Yu Zheng, Deirdre Logue, Terry Jones, Becky Yip, Omid Shakiba, Scott Lalonde and myself for Phillip Hoffman and Franci Duran’s Process Cinema course. My dearest Mo drew the handwritten title cards.”
How Can I Possibly Sleep When There Is Music gets: 📷📷📷📷📷📷📷📷/10.
Luka Kuplowsky – How Can I Possibly Sleep When There Is Music [Music Video]
