Nashville group Stranded have given us the video for new track ‘Celine’s Dilemma’ to stream on tQ. As Stranded tell The Quietus, the song explores feelings of alienation, disorientation, loneliness, and lack of fulfilment in one’s job. In short, a world-weariness and yearning inspired by Blue Nile’s Hats record. “[Blue Nile] would often tackle city life and human interactions existing in the modern world,” says David of Stranded. “Similarly, Bergman films also convey those human conditions, and I seem to go back to him when looking for expression.”

For the video, Stranded gave Coco Collective free reign to work as they please. The only details that Stranded sent them was note about the personal aspect of the track, and that it also grew out of a reading of Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s novel Journey to the End of the Night.

Paul MacGee of Coco Collective, who directed the video, first heard Stranded’s ‘Nervous Splendour’ in 2018 on Optimo’s NTS show. After playing the track on his Radio Saltire program, David asked MacGee to put together a video for Stranded’s debut EP, Celine’s Dilemma. MacGee then enlisted the help of cinematographer Toño Trillo and artist Holly Birtles for props. The collective shot the video at various locations in East Lothian, south of Edinburgh, Scotland throughout this past summer. In the video, Birtles’ sculptural objects — colorful, abstracted inflatables — and MacGee’s motion graphics, create a multimedia experience with Trillo’s camera work and Stranded’s music.

“The idea of combining a somewhat fluid camera language with pretty basic geometrical patterns and some colored text was the result of taking into consideration different levels of meaning,” MacGee tells The Quietus. “The rhythmic aspect that seems to be pushing you forward as the tempo stays the same but the amplitude varies, the melodic unexpected dissonances that convey some sort of bizarreness and the timbres of synths combined with some natural sounding claps that make for a level of juxtaposition.”

“We brought all those elements together through a pretty basic narrative lead by a slightly humanized dog and I just hope that with that we are able to trigger people’s own perceptual experience into making the music become something other than itself.”

Celine’s Dilemma is out TK on Optimo.