Pray For Sound are one of those bands I always feel I should be writing about more. First off, they're excellent; they make the kind of interesting, high-impact post-rock that I am a massive fan of. But secondly they are also immaculate artists, always thinking about the package surrounding their music. Thankfully, even though Nightswimming, their latest album, was released all the way in the distant past of 2024, I have an opportunity to write about them now. The band have collaborated with Chris King, of This Will Destroy You fame, to conjure up an eerie and engrossing video for "Nightswimming", the titular track off of said release. It's an experience and a half, so head on down below to check it out for yourselves!
First off, writing about this video made me remember just how much I like this tune and its atmospheric energies. It transports immediately to the spaces I was in last year, memory and music melding powerfully around the track's build up and release. Now add to that King's work, which blends "lo-fi" tools like a Sony Handycam Hi8 and a Fisher-Price PXL2000 with machine learning models to create something very uncanny and enveloping, for lack of a better word. This has the added value of showcasing the real potential of machine learning in art, beyond the slop of "AI" and the laziness of its application. Here, the tools are used properly by a human artist to augment previous footage, extracting from it a perspective and enhancing its themes.
Put this altogether and you get a wonderfully effective package, one which really drives home the strengths of Pray For Sound. If you have to dive into their post-rock goodness, Nightswimming is as good a place as any to do so. Get going!