Sleep Sound

Album: Single Release Only (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • The song's music video was directed by Sofia Mattioli, who is a London-based artist and poet. The clip shows deaf children and young adults dancing in response to both the director's movements and the music's vibrations in the air. "I was on a train listening to music, getting deep into it, and this girl started staring at me," Mattioli told Nowness of the genesis of her visual. "After a while I took my headphones off and she came up to me, started signing and then wrote me a note to say that she was deaf but could almost feel the music by my movement."

    With the germ of an idea from this chance encounter, Mattioli created the video using 13 members of the Manchester Deaf Centre. "The relationship between silence and music is a big part of what I am trying to express with my work," said Mattioli. "The first kid in the video, Archie, was bliss - all of them were amazing. I hope this is a project I can develop further."
  • The clip won Best Video at the 2014 Q Awards. Jamie told Q magazine how the video came about: "The idea came from Sofia," he said, "she's obsessed with the correlation between sound and silence and she wanted to see if her movements and vibrations of my song could influence deaf and partially deaf children and adults - to see if they would be able to dance to the music even if they couldn't hear it. It's a very honest, touching and I guess, beautiful video."
  • This samples the barbershop vocals from the Four Freshmen's 1952 track "It's a Blue World."

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