Tags: New Music
Edwin Raphael premiered the music video for his new single “Sea Of Things” today in Flaunt. The song gives a small glimpse into the “spectrum of human indulgence” he explores in his upcoming Staring At Ceilings EP, which is due out in February 2021.
The Montreal-via-Dubai based artist parallels most things in life to water and the ocean.
“The Water represents the dips, the troughs, the highs, the utopias where my mind is pushed, swallowed, and thrown around as I try to decipher the complexities within,” Raphael told Kajal. “I’ve no choice but be a slave to the tides and take it where it always will, the shore.”
The song personifies this exercise of letting go, of leaning into experiences, uncertainties, and emotions – for Raphael, allowing the water to consume him is a way towards resilience, towards mutual indulgence. The video features spliced scenes of water, ocean, even glacial melt in all their abundance, ferocity, and tranquility, next to clips of Raphael, often submerged or in proximity to water, as a manifestation of the preoccupations of his mind. He sings, “Maybe it’s a bad thing / maybe it’s a sad thing / maybe it’s not // because into wings, you’ll grow.”
With “Sea of Things,” Raphael says that the title and the idea for the song were “etched in the walls of my throat” before the words came out. The pandemic presented an unexpected space to catalyze the creativity needed to bring the song into fruition. In a time when he’s experiencing being the most alone he has ever been in his life, Raphael found the words to not only finalize his upcoming EP, but to write enough material for his next album.
“I think allowing yourself to be that alone and still be content is tricky, but I think it definitely peaked my writing and tonic of creating music,” he said.
With his Staring at Ceilings, Raphael explores the spectrum of human indulgence, from love, to life’s anxieties, to addictions. “The project reflects a progression from hopelessness to hopeful…that the human mind is capable of going to the bottom of the sea and still make it out under the sun,” he said.
Through the EP, Raphael wants to create an escape for listeners where they can find refuge from their anxieties. In one scene in the “Sea of Things” video, the words “don’t drown” flashes at the bottom of the screen as Raphael plunges into a swimming pool. With his bedroom voice and earthy melodies, Raphael gives us the antidote.