Adventurous curiosity marks the work of Danish artist Excelsior, both musically and in her subject matter. Her song Time Of None is a clear example of that, a track almost classical in its dramatic structure and theatrical timing, but built using the materials and textures of modern pop. Time Of None may have come out last year, but now its audience is having another door opened for them into the song’s ideas of place and alienation, with the release of a video for the song. And it just so happens we’ve got that video for you here today, along with a Q’n’A with Excelsior about the whole thing.
So tell us a little about the song Time Of None.
Time of None is a personal torch song about the search for new territories. It is a gloomy narrative touching in sound and lyrics upon the blurry lines between physical, mental and digital boundaries. Of how easy it is to stop sensing the world gently.
Photo by Alexander Arnild Peitersen
The song’s been out for a while, why did you want to make a video for it now?
It was important for me to make a visual extension of the song, somehow translating the lyrical themes into physical rooms and situations. The bare, empty rooms are actually my childhood home which had just been sold at the time when we shot the video. Being in these rooms, with no furniture and the total absence of the past, was quite alienating, which I thought matched the darkness of the song quite well.
The video switches between several scenes, what’s the artistic intention with that?
I wanted to visually capture different angles of loneliness and alienation, being the underlying feelings in the song. To me there’s something extremely graceful and at the same time a little disturbing about ice-skating. I found it very touching to watch Pernille (the young ice skater) in her shiny dress in that enclosed, freezing and quite lifeless arena, skating round and round and being this soft body in a cold somehow inhuman environment. It made perfect sense to include sequences of that exact situation in the video alongside the empty rooms of my childhood home and flashlights in a dark forest.
Finally, your debut album O Horizon is coming out soon after years of work, what can you tell us about it?
O Horizon is a cross-artistic release which has been underway for a long time and I’m extremely excited about releasing it soon! Besides the album, the release also includes an artbook made in collaboration with a bunch of great Danish artists consisting of photographic work, graphic design, song lyrics and a beautiful textual remix of the lyrics – altogether acting as the visual extension of the music. I started the compositional work back in 2017 and I have thus been through a long line of inspiration. In the writing process I listened quite eclectically to renaissance lute, different types of fanfares, dungeon synth and Visible Cloaks’ Soundcloud mixtapes, just to mention a few, while simultaneously finding lyrical inspiration in old idioms, different poetic forms and far out myths about the female anatomy.
Time Of None is out now on The Big Oil Recording Company.