Sima Cunningham has unveiled ‘Your Bones‘, the second single off her upcoming debut album High Roller. Following ‘Nothing’, the track comes paired with a music video from director Jake Saner. Check it out below.
“‘Your Bones’ is about giving the closest people in your life the space to go through whatever they are going through,” Cunningham explained in a statement. “For a long time I’ve been trying to practice being by people’s side but not asking them to fix whatever is weighing on them. My old friend who I grew up with in Chicago, Jake Saner, is a brilliant cinematographer and when he heard the song told me we should film a beautiful snapshot of my life – and capture it on Kodak Super 8 film. So that’s what we did. I like to think of the architecture of Chicago being the bones that I grew up amongst. Now – seeing the video, and whenever I sing the song, I think about all the space I want to give my daughter to feel big feelings and develop her own perspective on the world.”
Jake Saner added:
Sima’s peaceful yet haunting song “Your Bones” laid out a simple and clear framework for this piece. To me, this is a song about holding space. About caring from afar and trusting these elastic bonds of love. We wanted to draw tension from the absence of a person, the suggestion of connection and the allowance of distance. As the song swells with a tender and melodic bridge followed by a peaceful and uplifting harmonium instrumental, this tension in the frame breaks with human connection and a more dynamic camera.
For the cinematography, I took inspiration from the black and white photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Fan Ho each of whom capture a sense of both isolation and community in urban settings through spacious compositions. As the video progresses this photographic aesthetic evolves into a grainy 1960’s handheld rock-doc quality when Sima finds connection with her people.
We shot on Kodak Tri-X Reversal which compliments both of these aesthetic: creating an otherworldly mystery in deep shadows for the compositional moments and a grainy, vibrant nostalgia in the handheld sections. Shooting on film was a necessity for this project. Oddly enough, the micro budget made it even more necessary. We needed life and depth in these frames. Life in the architecture. Without the resources to populate frames, control locations or do complex lighting, we borrowed this vitality from organic nature of the medium. Kodak Tri X combined with the loose registration of my old Arri 16 S, gives even static frames a captivating fluidity. Our assets were time and the support of our community. We shot 14 100ft roll daylight spools over 3 days, enlisting friends and borrowing locations. The lightweight and simple Arri 16 S made it possible to for me to be a mobile one-man crew as we traversed Chicago.
High Roller is set for release on August 30 via Ruination Records.
