New York, NY (February 16, 2011) – Woodstock-based composer, songwriter and singer Sarah Fimm releases her latest music video today, a collaboration with director Erik Montovano, mastermind behind the ground-breaking New York City-based graphic design and production team, Newspeak. “Yellow” is the first single off Sarah’s seventh studio album, Near Infinite Possibility, set to be released in the beginning of May.
The song and video were inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “[amazon_link id=”159986603X” target=”_blank” ]The Yellow Wallpaper And Other Stories[/amazon_link],” a dark collection of journal entries written by a woman whose husband has put her on “rest cure;” confining her to a bedroom of a house that he has rented for the summer. Forbidden to work, she has to hide her journal entries from him, so that she can recuperate from what he calls a “temporary nervous depression —a slight hysterical tendency,” a diagnosis common to women in that period. The story depicts the effect of confinement on the narrator’s mental health, and her descent into psychosis, paranoia, delusion and desperate fear, as the disparity between reality and the events of her mind crumble. The work has been regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the nineteenth century toward women’s physical and mental health.
The cinematography of the video was inspired by silent film, contemporary art, and design; psychologically, it draws upon the writings of Nietzsche, Carl Jung, Jean Paul Sartre, and Hunter S. Thompson. Employing tropes of horror films, eerie color treatments and quick edits, the video invokes feelings of curiosity and wonder, and at the same time, macabre and unease. The goal was to create a constantly shifting palette of reality to obscure the difference between dreams and waking life, between the conscious and unconscious mind.
As Sarah puts it, “all of us at some point have or will feel the effects of mental instability throughout our lives. It is of the utmost importance that it not be misunderstood, or treated with disdain.”
ABOUT SARAH FIMMSarah Fimm is an American born singer-songwriter who lives outside of Woodstock, NY on a mountain looking over a lake. She was born to Jewish parents in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and her grandmother is a survivor of the holocaust. After studying and sewing her musical oats at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Sarah went on to independently record and release seven studio albums, the seventh of which is due out in May, 2011. Billboard Magazine called her 2002 sophomore album, A Perfect Dream, “one of the most enchanting discoveries of the year,” and Rolling Stone named Nexus one of the top 10 albums of 2004. Her music has been heard on various major motion pictures, Lifetime Network and MTV shows. She has toured and/or recorded with heavy-hitters Bauhaus, Delirium, Iggy Pop, Josh Freese, Earl Slick, Danny Blume, Paul Bushnell, Sara Lee, and Sterling Campbell, among others.
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