Artists Michael Amstad and Marte Eknæs assemble a cinematic meditation to accompany The Place I’ve Been Missing, the stunning new album from Not Waving.
Alessio Natalizia, best known for his eclectic productions, emotive songwriting and exploratory collaborations as Not Waving, reunites with artists Michael Amstad and Marte Eknæs for a meditative visual accompaniment to his stunning new record, The Place I’ve Been Missing. Drawing together the wide variety of styles and moods we have seen Natalizia touch on with his work with Romance, Spivak and the late, great Mark Lanegan, as well as in his role as visionary label head of the always wonderful Ecstatic, The Place I’ve Been Missing plays out as an intimate and fragile reflection on grief and transcience, floating between synth-pop reverie and avant-garde elegy.
Amstad and Eknæs’ slow, cinematic assemblage picks out the contemplative qualities of Natalizia’s project, a structurally experimental response to a deeply personal statement that pulls focus on small moments of vitality and wonder. A spiritual successor to the “emotive collage of vérité lockdown footage” the artists pieced together for Natalizia’s debut album, How To Leave Your Body, The Place I’ve Been Missing unfolds like a tone poem, the film’s procession of imagery and digital manipulation serving as an elegant analogue for Natalizia’s own expansive and intuitive approach to composition.
“It shows the fragility and ephemeral quality of nature and animals as sisters and brothers,” the artists explain. “Some of the footage is shot with a thermographic camera, which creates images through infrared radiation instead of visible light. This opens up a different window to our environment from what we can see with the human eye. The colour spectrum from blue, via pink, to light yellow traces the cold and the heat and highlights the changes of living energy.”
The Place I’ve Been Missing is out now. You can find Not Waving on Instagram and at the Ecstatic Bandcamp.
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