Journeying through light, colour, and enchanting sound, London-based singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Grace Acladna’s new single, ‘Mother’s Car’ is a transcendental discovery of the self.
Acladna is a burning, emergent force in the U.K. music scene with her soulful voice and reflective lyricism. Blending an array of influences from soul to dance music to melancholic and introspective beats, her music sensitively explores the complexities of the human condition.
One to watch: Grace Acladna. Singer, song-writer, multi-instrumentalist, model, producer.
Acladna has spoken about the personal experience that influenced ‘Mother’s Car’: a chance encounter with an ex-friend. The song navigates standing in the wake of an unhealthy relationship and dealing with harboured mixed feelings for someone from your past, but ultimately, discovering the love and respect you can find for yourself on the other side. Self-empowerment is professed through the lyrics whilst Acladna’s enchanting choral harmonies imbue the song with an otherworldly aura that keeps you transfixed. Acladna is a multi-talent.
The accompanying visualizer to ‘Mother’s Car’ has a skilful narrative framing centred around Acladna’s experiences of self-hood. Expressing the multitudes of emotions and presentations of the self, identity is juxtaposed using colour, light, and a collation of shot-to-shot scenes displaying varied aspects of Acladna’s self-hood. The direction of the video, marvellously handled by Honor Evans, follows Acladna in daylight against the backdrop of a housing estate, to the dusky horizon of the city, to a night-time drive drenched in red light.
Through the direction, Acladna is accessed intimately as she looks, deeply, at the camera. At other times, she is obscured: her reflection is only available through the rear-view mirror of the car she is driving. Various parts of her face are sought out by the camera until she stares at the camera directly, asking ‘are you afraid of me?’ Echoes of this rhetorical question stick to the air as Acladna’s haunting vocals carry the question of how to navigate communication with someone you used to know. This lyric also translates how we can become unsure of our identity and self-perception in the context of unhealthy relationships. How we can come to question our own experience of what happened, and how we feel about it. This fracture in self-perception is communicated within the song’s production, profoundly in the vocal distortions and dubs over Acladna’s pivotal line, the fundamental question: ‘Are you afraid of me?’
After severing unhealthy ties and grieving a relationship that once was, the central journey within ‘Mothers Car’ is one of self-assurance, confidence, and respect. Transformation is embroidered into the very words Acladna sings. As she dances under the exposing daylight through to the alluring night, she is bodied through movement and inhabits her body soulfully and consciously. Pedestal shots present Acladna standing tall and strong whilst the use of a VCR camera for certain shots presents Acladna as unguarded and delicate.
And this is what Acladna captures so perfectly: the essence of being human, of being a woman. The complexities, contradictions, and multitudes of identity and self-hood. Simultaneously being intimate and distanced, standing strong and being vulnerable, being direct and reserved. She captures how the grey areas of identity are channeled through relationships and the loss of them; of seeing yourself through your own eyes and another’s.
0 Comments