DELANILA is the current nomme de plume of accomplished composer and musician Danielle Eva Schwob. As DELANILA, Schwob creates experimental pop music with a heavy cinematic quality, blending her ear for a simple pop melody with the grandiose production and vision of her past as a composer for visual media and for concert music. Her latest single is a slow-burning dark pop song called “Time Slips Away.”
Today we’re excited to premiere the new video for this song, a dramatically-choreographed clip that serves as the perfect vehicle to express the song’s theme of disconnection and isolation in our current digital age. The video was directed by Charlie Mysak and features dancer Leal Zielinska alone in vast empty office buildings, slowly contorting her body to match the moodiness of the song. As the intensity of the song slowly builds to a wall of sound dynamic punctuated by squelching guitar riffs, so too do the visuals, with the protagonist of the video making her way to the outside world, finishing the sequence with a slight spring in her step before the scene fades to black.
“The song is told from the perspective of someone who is sitting behind a screen and watching the world pass them by,” said DELANILA. “And that’s what’s happening to the dancer. Music videos and songs get dangerous when you tell people what they mean but I can tell you what it means to me and what the intention was. The idea is she’s in a room by herself, she’s imagining connections with people that maybe she’s let slide and the dream world where she’s dancing is a place where she can connect with them, sort of her imagination.”
“I don’t think I’m alone in having this experience but there was certainly a time in my life, earlier on in my career after I moved to New York where I was spending a lot of time in a room by myself,” she said about her personal experiences that colored the writing of the song. “When you get good at any kind of creative position you spend a lot of time on your own refining your craft and you know, I’d just moved to the city and maybe it took me a second to find my friend group and figure out what I was doing professionally. I found it really jarring to be connected to everyone that I had known through things like social media platforms. I found the illusion of being social and connected while actually just being in a room by myself. And I wasn’t so happy about that. I don’t think I’m alone in having that experience, the way that people are now we’re increasingly isolated from one another. We’re all addicted to these things and I don’t know if they’re making us happy.”
“Time Slips Away” is a taste of DELANILA’s upcoming album Overloaded, which was co-produced with GRAMMY-winning producer David Bottrill and guest appearances from members of Portugal. The Man, John Zorn’s band and others. While DELANILA is still a rising name in the world of pop music, she’s extremely accomplished as a composer, with her music featured by Lincoln Center, National Sawdust, BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn!, Chamber Music America, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MATA Festival. She’s worked some major names in the music industry, including the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, Ben Folds, Tara Hugo & Philip Glass, Ido Zmishlany, The Pogues and David Simon.
“The record [Overloaded] isn’t necessarily a criticism of technology, it’s more a personal reckoning with it,” she said. “Of being connected to everyone and having information be accessible and having the means to talk about your work and own your own corner of the internet and have the effect of…we’re connected by disconnected at the same time.”
Leave a Comment