Road Trip Through Iceland with Washed Out’s ‘Amor Fati’
Since Ernest Greene (a.k.a. Washed Out) unassumingly dropped a few homemade tracks onto Myspace back in 2009, he has steadily moved into the center of the ever-growing synthpop-drenched, chillwave scene.
The unexpected success of these first few tracks prompted the EP Life and Leisure, where tracks like “Feel It All Around” (Greene’s biggest hit to date), fueled a North American and European tour. Most artists, with the momentum of a successful EP, would have rushed to produce a full-length album.
But Washed Out decided to entirely rework his creative process, leaving behind the sample-based way of looping a song together, and pursuing a more organic way of acquiring live sounds. It therefore wasn’t until last July that Within and Without blessed us with it’s sunny rhythms and spacey synths via Sub Pop Records.
The video for “Amor Fati,” the latest single off Within and Without, dropped online last week with great images to accompany an already popular song. The video stars Luke Rathborne, a Brooklyn-based solo artist, and follows his character through an Icelandic road-trip; the type you’d dream about as a teenager if you knew where Iceland was.
The enormity of Washed Out’s sound is reflected by beautiful shots of the Icelandic countryside; the driving nature of the beat which takes us through Rathborne’s journey seamlessly; and our desire to dance to the track is answered by the raving house parties they apparently have in Iceland.
So, it would be fair to say that all in all, Yoonha Park (the video’s director) did a pretty good job on creating a video that manages to interpret the essence of “Amor Fati.”
Check out the video below, and why not download the track for free via SoundCloud while you’re at it as well.
