Premiere: Jacques Greene “Afterglow”
We speak with the Montreal DJ/producer about the visuals complementing his sound
From his just-released debut LP, Montreal-based Jacques Greene‘s “Afterglow” video is premiering exclusively on Cool Hunting. DJ/producer Greene has been making vibey, R&B-influenced, synth-heavy music for years—releasing his first EP in 2012—and his full-length record Feel Infinite has been highly anticipated for good reason. The concept album is centered on and in tribute to nightlife and the club.
Today, the artist has premiered the video for “Afterglow”—directed by Mauriès Mato (aka Melissa Matos and Emmanuel Mauriès Rinfret)—and we spoke to him about the visuals that match the sound.
Can you explain a little about the extra inclusion of vocals and spoken word in the video?
It’s sort of an extension of what I get at with the snippets of vocal samples in the music. Trying to inject the music with an inherent humanity. I’m a big synth guy, but at the end of the day nothing is better than the human voice so it was kind of cool to include a bit of the voices of what the people in the video were saying to bring them to life a bit more. A lot of it was trying to be as accidental and incidental as possible, as for the poems and more focused written bits just trying to hint at these ideas of connections and other people and how we relate to one another.
How important do you feel the music video is when complementing a song? Do you feel like they’re separate entities?
Super-important, I really wish I had the means and the time to make videos for every single song. They are separate in the sense that I don’t really think of the video while I’m working on music but they are fully symbiotic and linked. Every video I’ve done in the last three or four years has started from long conversations with Melissa Matos about what the music felt like to me and the mood and world I pictured and then letting her run with that. So the videos become an extension of the ideas that I clumsily try to hint at in my music.
Was there a specific mood or aesthetic you wanted to portray with this video? how did that match or elevate the song itself?
Yeah, I think “Afterglow” is one of the better moments on the album where I nailed this feeling of emotional ambiguity and general intensity I was trying to get across that I’ve felt in the club and stuff. I cherish relationships I have with everyone in my life and embrace how difficult being a person and being with other people can be and I think the video when combined with the track becomes pretty effective at hinting at all of that. It’s more a video about emotions and feelings then a narrative or whatever and I think it nails those things as we envisioned them!
Images courtesy of Mathieu Fortin
