Videos

SOUND OF CERES share new single & video “Sunray Venus”

• 22nd Apr 2022

Having recently announced their new album, Emerald Sea, is set for release June 17th via Joyful Noise Recordings, New York-based audiovisual project Sound of Ceres are sharing the second glimpse of the record with their new single & video “Sunray Venus” directed by Matthew Maddox.

Speaking about new track “Sunray Venus“, Ryan Hover of Sound of Ceres said “A song of nascent mind’s curiosity. Venus Caelestis, the morning star, has left the cradle of the void to climb sea-crags and delve in grottos for the flame spied from afar, a flicker beneath the waves, the deep wish of the unknown to be known.”

On the visuals, director Matthew Maddox said “Listening to the song and speaking with K and Ryan, an image of a visitor to this planet popped into my mind. I wanted to capture the mystery and child-like wonder of what it would be like to explore a new world for the first time.”

Emerald Sea is written in three acts and follows two deities who trail each other through the furthest reaches of experience. There is the Universe, all that exists, voiced by performance artist Marina Abramović. And there is Venus, transformer of matter and avatar of love, sung by the group’s lead vocalist Karen Hover (who goes by k). The record tells the story of how the universe comes to know itself. Rendered in dynamic, ambitious orchestral passages, it forms the basis of future stage performances intended to draw its half-submerged narrative into the visual sphere. In its dreamlike impressions, it could also be the soundtrack to a long-forgotten early musical film – an experience that delighted and transported audiences and then vanished from record, surviving only in the imprint of memory.

Abramović first met the band after attending one of their performances during a 2017 Brooklyn residency. “My attraction to Sound of Ceres comes from the fact that the music feels so galactic – from a very part of the universe,” she says.

Through a dazzling suite of songs inspired by Maurice Ravel’s ballet Daphnis et Chloé, Gustav Holst’s The Planets, and Les Baxter’s midcentury exotica, Emerald Sea studies intimacy on both an interpersonal scale and a cosmological one. Connection and severance, joy and grief, wonder and bewilderment all tumble through its scope. In the widest frame, the universe begins, meets itself, and ends. In the closest frame, two people encounter each other, grow close, and then separate. These stories are two views of the same fractal. In every intimacy human beings cultivate, every rush of connection, no matter how fleeting, we reenact the universe for ourselves.

“I envisioned myself journeying through these different realms — space, the land, the sea, the heavens — and following Marina’s character,” says k. “I always saw her as a shadow figure that I couldn’t quite figure out.”

“During this process, several images went through my mind,” Abramović says of her participation in the album’s recording. “The first one was an enormous cosmic snake. The second was a black volcano rising from the sea with a voice coming deep from inside. The third was simply me talking from my childhood dreams.” 

Ryan says, “The album’s story is an allegory for the emergence of mind and meaning from the matter of the universe, and its eventual fading, with a glimmer of hope at the end.”

In its current cycle, Sound of Ceres is Derrick Bozich, songwriter, harpist, and flautist; Jacob Graham, synthesist, costumer, and light designer; K Hover, vocalist, lyricist, costumer, and choreographer; and Ryan Hover, songwriter and producer. They recorded Emerald Sea in collaboration with Jon Sonneberg at Ka-Boom studio in Ohio. It was mixed by Nicholas Principe and mastered by Kramer. When you receive it, when its sounds in motion light up your mind’s eye, it is also created in collaboration with you.

Pre-order Emerald Sea: http://joyfulnoi.se/EmeraldSea