Tekla Vály’s 17min film is the visual accompaniment to the recently released Swan/Koistinen EP. Swan/Koistinen feat. Owen Pallett play Flow Festival in August.
Tekla Vály’s Swan/Koistinen film offers a dreamlike-mind-state with themes of empowerment, life and beauty to create a visual narrative for the EP. Shot in Finland and Italy, Vály scripted the film to interpret the musical story of becoming engulfed in an illness narrative, which strips you from yourself – creating the need to reconstruct something where the loss is. While the music is exact in its narrative about being diagnosed, hospitalised, and then learning to live as a chronically ill woman and beyond, the film operates on an emotional terrain, which comes to the truth from a wholly different place: magical realism.
Vály comments “I wanted the videos to be dreamlike like life itself.
Life and dreams are born from moments, glimpses, colors, light and moods that, as an experience in our minds, are linked together as a puzzle and a series of events that create a story.
The themes of the EP are tough and difficult topics, so I wanted to focus the film on the power of life and the momentum of beauty.”
Credits:
Screenplay: Tekla Vály (together with Astrid Swan)
Filming: Tekla Vály
Editing: Tekla Vály
Models: Astrid Swan, Stina Koistinen, Hanna Päivinen, Tiina Sysimusta, Tekla Vály
Read more via SWIT : First Look: Swan/Koistinen film by Tekla Vály
Swan/Koistinen EP is an art pop symphony for two voices. The EP depicts life with chronic, incurable illness, and brings sick women’s experiences close to the listener through music.
Listen to Swan/Koistinen EP
Swan/Koistinen EP is a new collaboration between songwriters Astrid Swan and Stina Koistinen. The project unites two artists’ voices for a moment celebrating the importance of co-survivors (or thrivers/metavivors) and the power of sharing with others in similar situations. The songs on the EP deal with issues that arise when living as a sick woman. Life continues but everything has changed. The music brings up fragility, sadness over loss, and the elated giddiness of living. It also discusses embodiment, becoming a subject of medicine and argues for the importance of listening to marginalised, crip and chronic people’s voices. The songs, co-composed by Swan and Koistinen, recorded and produced by Swan, are made of hospital atmosphere, human voice, electronics, piano and Canadian pop visionary Owen Pallett’s string arrangements.
Some reaction to the EP
“…it’s four songs of these two women putting that experience on the table for all to see.” ATH
“But what you’re left with is the singing. Music overcomes all obstacles” Rosvot
“…a disorienting representation of the mental space between hopeful denial and crushing reality.” Indie 30
“They are voices from the dark, from the life with the ubiquitous fear that sounds in songs like ‘Diagnosis’ ” Nordische Musik
“Oh these clever Finns” God Is In The TV
“Seeking a power to gain from sharing the experience with others, Swan/Koistinen’s EP is subtle, cerebral and cathartic to this listener” Nordic Spotlight
Long interview at Image magazine in Finnish
Interview at Flow Magazine in English
Swan/Koistinen feat Owen Pallett one and only live appearance this August at Flow Festival