Washed Out - Waking Up (Eclipse Live Session)

JUL 01 2024 · 12:00

Washed Out - Waking Up (Eclipse Live Session) (2024) Director: Jonah Haber Era: Post-Chillwave Maturity / Mid-2020s Experimental Live-Cinema (2024) - An era defined by artists merging live performance documentation with large-scale natural phenomena as cinematic spectacle, released ahead of Washed Out's fifth LP 'Notes From a Quiet Life' (Sub Pop, June 28, 2024) Exceptionally high. This is a formally unique music video with no meaningful precedent: a complete, unedited single-take live performance filmed inside a total solar eclipse. Its quantitative signature, zero cuts, near-zero brightness, unbroken 343-second duration, perfectly mirrors its conceptual ambition. It is an irreproducible document of a specific astronomical event fused with a specific artistic performance, making it both a culturally significant artifact and a technically unprecedented music video. Context: Released in June 2024 as a lead visual for Washed Out's fifth album 'Notes From a Quiet Life' (Sub Pop), this video captures Ernest Greene performing live during the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse in Bandera, Texas, a widely watched North American cultural moment. The video operates at the intersection of environmental art, live performance documentation, and celestial spectacle, reflecting a broader mid-2020s indie tendency toward experiential and site-specific creative production. Greene's rural relocation in 2021 and his farm 'Endymion' (named after a John Keats poem) anchored his artistic philosophy around quietude, nature, and wonder, values made literal by staging a music video inside a total eclipse. The piece represents a rejection of digital artifice in favor of unrepeatable natural phenomena as production design. Director notes: After months of research and meticulous planning, Haber and Ernest Greene (Washed Out) collaborated to film a one-take live performance of 'Waking Up' in the path of full totality of the April 8, 2024 solar eclipse, on location in Bandera, Texas. The performance was captured during the approximately four minutes and eight seconds of full totality, during which the moon fully blocked the Sun, rendering the outdoor environment near-dark and emulating nighttime. The resulting visual, shot in a single, unbroken take with no guarantee of success given weather and timing risks, creates an effect described by reviewers as resembling a spotlit stage performance, despite being filmed entirely outdoors. The video was released on June 13, 2024, ahead of the album's June 28, 2024 release via Sub Pop.