Last month, cellist Peter Gregson announced a brand new album—”a collection of nine songs without words for cello, modular synthesizer, and string quartet”—and dropped a new single and accompanying video on YouTube. The blended sequences of colour and artful monochrome shots, and the atmospheric mix synth and cello that introduce the song, immediately make it clear that this is a unique and personal project.
“I received a few pitches for the song,” says Peter, “but Alex’s brief just jumped out of the pile. The pitch was kindly and respectfully written and just instantly spoke to me. It represented something I was trying to get at with the album overall, this kind of collision between natural and man-made beauty…to me, the music and the video together trigger big concepts and enigmatic questions and the colours and tactile nature of it all really speaks to me. I am really honoured that we have this. It feels like a special alignment of everything.”
“I received the music through my agent, who had already mentioned it was incredible,” explains LA-based Alex, with equal enthusiasm. “I listened to the track and just kind of went off to the races with it. I immediately saw this image of Peter performing against the city, and then this transitional journey that led to nature. We basically saw the city wake up as we were shooting. We went from the streets being quiet and dark to the light coming up, and people going to their morning yoga class or to work. Some of them noticed us and started to film Peter on the back of this trailer playing his cello, which must have looked crazy to them. It was a blast.”
The video continues with more grainy black and white close-ups of Peter and his cello, which are gradually merged with enigmatic bokeh and urban architecture. Then the camera pans back to reveal Peter, in the thick of night, strapped to the back of a trailer and lit atmospherically by a lamp, playing along to “VISION”’s mellifluous opening strains. It’s not clear where the video is shot until dawn breaks and we see New York City’s distinctive backdrop of skyscrapers, yellow cabs, and cinematic plumes of steam.
“I'm not a particularly visual person,” comments Peter, “so it was wonderful to be part of something that has such a striking visual narrative and identity to it. I had just always assumed it would be a green screen. It never occurred to me that I would be strapped onto the back of a truck at 3am like some kind of Mad Max scene, and that I would play my cello just like that, suspended, as Manhattan woke up. Halfway through the video, I moved from being on the back of the trailer to being on the front and was just kind of floating along Park Avenue. It was a fabulous atmosphere, if a little surreal in places. We even got our own police escort!”
As daylight breaks in the video, the scenery shifts from a nocturnal urban milieu to shots of passing trees, bodies of water and sun starting to burst through the clouds—all as Peter continues playing his plaintive, yearning composition. The video ends with Peter laying on his back next to a pond, his face a chiaroscuro of leafy shade and bright morning sun, blinking and smiling into the light.
“We deliberately used a mix of 16mm black and white film, a very old technique, and modern digital technology to create a type of mixed media that would feel new. I personally hate it when a song has a lyric about a palm tree and then a video pans to a palm tree. To me, as long as the video captures the feeling of a track then you can do truly anything.”
Peter agrees: “It really struck me with this project how film can be such an expressive medium for lyricless, amorphous music like mine, that can be put in a lot of places and it kind of shape shifts. If you go and watch a movie these days, there’s next to no room for the viewer to be trusted to think about anything. Everything is spoon-fed. But for my style of music and for Alex’s visual language, it’s much more wide open, provoking much bigger questions than if you were sitting in a concert hall just thinking ‘is this sad’ or ‘is this happy’. Being honest, sitting in my room alone on my own trying to finish a piece of music is the worst part of my job; the process of writing music is not why I write music. It’s got to live and breathe and it’s this kind of collaboration that makes it sing. It almost looks like the music was written for the film. I am really proud of it—and all I did was turn up.”
Peter Gregson’s self-titled album will be released on the 11th April 2025.
VISION is out now.
Words by Paul Sullivan
