Nadeem SalaamA. Sarr | Praying Hands (Feat Ellen Winter / Russell Elliot) | Music Video Premiere
This summer we premiered “Praying Hands,” the single from producer/songwriter A. Sarr that featured Ellen Winter and Russell Elliot. For those that are new this Elevtr premiere, this was a song written on a hospital bed.
A. Sarr was equipped with only a laptop running a trial version of Ableton we recanted in July of 2016, but in the confines of a WiFi-less apparatus he began drafting “Praying Hands.” Ultimately as he began to recover from the very failed suicide attempt that landed him in the hospital, an entire album was rooted from that experience, and A. Sarr wanted us to release it.
We were honored than and we’re honored now to once again bring you more from the lifesaving project as we present the official music video for “Praying Hands.”
It features lyrics projected on screen in neon-drapped colors, sometimes in multiple languages like closed caption television, weakened signals projected the apparitions of Winter and Elliot, and even a brief cameo of the man behind the song as well. The multi-fashioned video features some diametrically different esthetics, as a director you might wonder why on one hand the dated inter-web / tele effects are placed with images of nature, as a deep appreciator to all-things that test my idea of what esthetic is or could be, I found them to re-define in their own way how visual pieces can represent song. So much so that I had to speak to Wamoo, who worked on creating this for A. Sarr. Wamoo is a musician and artist concentrating on audiovisual collage making and here’s what he had to say on creating the video,
Wamoo – “I am an anxious person by nature, and when I’m anxious I tend to obsess over my surroundings, both internal and external – the stilted style in which the song moves plays out exactly how I see stress going through its motions internally. That is why there are so many colors and images of nature and abstract figures in the video. I listened to the song almost exclusively while making it so that the images I use can move in sync (technically and emotionally). Fluidity, to me, is the most important thing when creating a work of art, and with a music video, the music and the images cannot be mutually exclusive, but rather two sides of one coin.”