san pell from mat riviere on Vimeo.
Mat Riviere’s Terrible Trouble EP featured among April’s best music on these pages a couple of months ago with our own Karl Smith writing: "Listening to Terrible Trouble feels like reading someone’s diary — except that someone is you, and everyone you know, have known, or will know, dislocated, at one remove."
Following on from the release of that EP, Riviere is now sharing a video for the opening track, ‘san pell’, which looks at the current spectre of advertising on our everyday lives and combines found footage, various screenshots and text to create a visual collage which Riviere explains more about below. You can check out the video itself above.
Could you tell us about the concepts behind the video?
Mat Riviere: I made the video with the writer Stacey Teague and the majority of footage was shot by her when she lived in the UK between 2013-14. Snapchat and Vine both became widely used during that time. I am interested in how easy it has become to document things and how that relates to memory and nostalgia. It sometimes seems that we are living several lives simultaneously. Our histories don’t leave us like they used to, the past is constantly looping somewhere online. So I am interjecting during the video (with found footage/screen captures/text), trying to challenge or reflect on what is being represented. I feel really bad about so many music videos and I think I just wanted to make something very personal and targeted while still trying to confront some of these ideas.
Could you explain the fixation with San Pellegrino?
I don’t know if I am fixated with San Pellegrino exactly, but during the making of the song and video it became an important image. Branding is obviously designed to stick in our heads but sometimes its pervasiveness is overwhelming. San Pellegrino came to represent, for me, something like the failure of memory. Like… I don’t remember what I said at the airport but I remember what I was drinking. As if our memories operate more like adverts than anything else. I guess I want the video to be viewed on those terms, as advertising, with all the falseness that implies. What you see isn’t real and hopefully the presence of branded products is a reminder of this.
