Watch: UMA “Vanity (Claude Speeed Version)” (exclusive)

17 Dec 2013 — Andrew Wagner

Berlin husband-and-wife duo UMA has just released a strangely enchanting new video for the Claude Speeed remix of their track “Vanity”. The original “Vanity” is a song that’s at once delicate and dangerous, with singer Ella delivering the vocals as though in a trance. In its casual darkness, the track conjures up moving through a city late at night, when the streets feel both peaceful and eerie in their isolation. While the Claude Speeed remix feels similarly suited for the late-night hours, his take on “Vanity” brings you to a dark and foreboding dance floor rather than the city. Speeed’s version adds powerful, booming bass synths while pitching Ella’s vocals down an octave or two and chopping up other of her vocals into rhythmic elements. There’s something oddly unsettling about the way Speeed manipulates the original track, mirrored by the grotesquely beautiful, grainy black-and-white video. In it, a man and woman (Ella and her husband Florian) rub their faces against a plane of glass. Mouths, noses and flesh become squished and distorted into strange forms, their bodies becoming uncanny in the process. If some gorgeous shots of pigeons flying away suggest a sliver of hope in “Vanity’s” otherwise hopeless soundscape, the last shot, of Ella’s face multiplying and then degrading, ends the track on a purely bleak note.

Watch “Vanity (Claude Speeed Version)” below. A full LP is forthcoming from UMA via Seayou Records in early 2014. Get the digital single of "Vanity" over here.