FADER PREMIERE
Heart beats, grandfather clocks, watches and syncopated marches star in this Alice Cohen-animated video for MAYa, the solo project of UK-born, New York-based recording artist Maya Hardinge. Layering smoky, incantatory vocals over a patchwork of cello, synths and sparse drum programming, it's the latest audio-visual missive from her video-only EP, a, the last in a series of releases recorded within the past decade and presumably meant to spell out the project's name (2007's Y, 2010's A, 2012's M). The passage of time looms as largely in the video as it does in the conceptual span of the MAYa project, although Hardinge, a passionate traveler, seemed most keen on us knowing that the beat to "Alpha Beta" was inspired by a trip to Sri Lanka, "where I worked on a film that's story was based around the Indian Classical dance form Bharata Natyam. I recorded the beat that the teacher used by beating a stick on a block of wood." Listen to the previous three MAYa EPs on her bandcamp, and look out for two additional videos from a in the weeks to come; each of them, she says, is a collaboration with a different visual artist, and you can view previous MAYa-related videos here.