Rich Aucoin’s upcoming album, Release, has a new video for “The Mind,” and despite being the second lyric-less track to be released, it’s another piece in the puzzle that points towards a concept album.
If we’ve learned anything from the music videos of Rich Aucoin it’s that there are two very distinct sides to this near-mythical being. On one side we have Rich Aucoin, the one-man dance party extraordinaire, who surrounds himself with writhing masses of serotonin-spurred revelers, and who literally embraces his audiences with a parachute.
Then we have the other Rich Aucoin: this foreign and enigmatic character that appears in his music videos, personified in the case of “The Mind” by a shimmering Mimi Audellynn, and there is something alien to it that practically screams “isolation.” Directed by Meghan Tansey Whitton, the otherworldly, windswept figure of “The Mind” presents this monolithic form at odds with its environment.
The themes of isolation and being subject to nature appears as though they may be a revisited concept from Aucoin’s previous video for the album’s title-track, “Release,” with has Aucoin, himself, floating along in the middle of the ocean.
In the case of “The Mind,” and despite the character’s inhuman nature, and even facelessness, it somehow coveys a sense of intrepid curiosity and perhaps joy as it acclimatizes to its surroundings. But, as Aucoin explains, the character is intentionally abstract, as one might expect from embodiment and such an intangible concept.
“The song is a reflection on the mind. The video is a reflection, as well. The less articulated, the better,” says Aucoin in an interview with Paste Magazine. “Meghan Tansey Whitton is a strong photographer and was experimenting with these reflections in the beautiful part of the world in which we both live, Nova Scotia. She shot this video over two years along with our faceless star, Mimi Audellyn.”
Aucoin’s upcoming album, Release, which he has described as an alternative soundtrack to Alice in Wonderland in a way we hope is entirely similar to the Pink Floyd mash-up “Dark Side of Oz,” is out May 17, 2019 via Haven Sounds.
Tour Dates:
05. 01-05.19 – Charlottetown, PEI @ East Coast Music Week
05.09-11.19 – Brighton, UK @ The Great Escape
05.17-19.19 – Wales, UK @ Focus Festival