Culture

Halcyon Selects: Blood Orange – Champagne Coast

For those who haven’t discovered him yet, Blood Orange (Devonté Hynes) is a british composer, songwriter and producer who released last summer one of the best debut albums of 2011. At first he wrote songs for various famous artists such as Florence + The Machine, The Chemical Brothers, Basement Jaxx and Theophilus London, but last year Blood Orange released his first personal full-length, Coastal Grooves, an album which still keeps the buzz around it. After three very good singles, DinnerSutphin Boulevard and Forget It, he releases his forth single Champagne Coast, while a few days ago a new music video for it was published on the website of New York Times. Famous stylist Halley Wollens (M.I.A., Rye Rye, Sleigh Bells, MNDR), does the direction and styling, while Andreas “Nout” Schmidt did the animation for the video. A very smart combination of retro kitsch aesthetics with Second Life-type graphics and collages of images from old interior design magazines and real teenager’s walls they found on flickr, results to the most aesthetically original music video we’ve seen in a long time, while the décor in each girl’s bedroom represents a list of artists work admired by Blood Orange himself such as Ed Ruscha, Morris Louis, Sonia Delaunay and Helen Frankenthaler.