From Pennsylvania to Brooklyn, the electronic-psych duo Corbu brings listeners into a serene adventure with a psychedelic music video for their latest single, "Lost & Found."
Consisting of Amanda Scott and Johnathan Graves, the couple-turned musical duo prides themself on their sturdy foundation of beats, sounds, and textures. Always capturing a mysterious and celestial quality with their sound and music videos, Corbu is excited to muster new fans with their imaginatively designed music.
Now releasing a music video for their recent hit, "Lost & Found," the single itself was an exciting collaboration with Manchester's Jimi Goodwin, who fueled the song with his distinct astral groove. Expanding on the video, viewers can catch Corbu in their home roots of Western Pennsylvania, basking in the spirit of nature with in-depth edits and psychedelic effects.
Hitting play on the music video for "Lost & Found," the scenes open with Amanda Scott and Johnathan Graves swaying in the forest's greenery abound the most vibrant and fresh wildlife. While they continue grooving to the song's psychedelic and celestial tones, Corbu hits the viewer with intense and trippy edits that make for a refreshing and exciting experience.
It's almost as if Corbu has transported us back to simpler times with this music video, as they share scenes that depict this Adam and Eve type of story that's set in the 60s. Also enjoying the pleasure of togetherness, the couple brings us into the harmony of love through their romantic and picturesque scenes that are all the more enhanced by nature's beauty.
Catch Corbu's recent picturesque music video for their single, "Lost & Found," on YouTube, and prepare your ears for their forthcoming 'Lost & Found' EP on June 4th.
Welcome to BuzzMusic, Corbu. We truly admire the in-depth edits and psychedelic feel of your recent music video for "Lost & Found." What inspired the scenes of nature and forestry for your recent music video?
Thanks for the kind words about the video! From my understanding, the woods and animals have always been used to represent the unconscious, in myths, stories, and dreams. It's all messy, beautiful, and beyond your control. A lot of our music deals with going inside yourself to figure things out, and "Lost & Found" was based on my experience of being adopted at four months old, and how those four months affected me later in life. There can be internal forces controlling your behavior that you don't understand unless you go off into the woods and confront whatever you find. So it made sense to create the video as a Grimm's fairy tale/mushroom trip, with predators and prey, and symbols of beauty and death in the forest. Regarding the single itself, what was it like working with Manchester's Jimi Goodwin for "Lost & Found?" How did he help bring your ideas and visions to life?
Jimi changed the song completely. It was originally an experiment, where we tried to record the song as a full, live "band" in one take in the studio. And it sounded good! Like a totally valid, competent indie rock song. But it wasn't Corbu, and we never want to release something that we don't love. We had an opportunity for Jimi to re-work it and produce it as he heard it, and what he did was so much more "us" than what we had done alone. The core song remained, but the performances you hear in the finished track are over 90% Jimi. It's been a dream for us since I've been a huge Doves fan my entire life and turned Amanda onto them early in our relationship. I used to work out covers of their songs in my room, and wait outside their shows to try and meet the band. Getting to actually hang out with Jimi, work with him and have his name next to ours is an unrealistic, rip-in-the-universe kind of thing for us. What was your recording and shooting process like for the music video, "Lost & Found?" Did a director accompany you during the shoot? Or did you direct the video yourself?
It's actually the first music video that we've ever shot, directed, and edited start-to-finish by ourselves. We filmed it at a campground in Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh. It’s a weird little slice of middle America, somewhere between a summer vacation spot and a trailer park. The place is pretty conservative, with American flags everywhere, but everyone covers their trailers in tons of tchotchkes - animals, dinosaur skeletons, etc. We spend time there in the summers with our families, and we always feel like the bad kids, which is mostly fun. We’re sneaking off and getting stoned, sampling the weird sound the sanitizing equipment makes, etc. So we thought it would be good to abstract all of it, and show something very normal through our lens to communicate the song. Now everyone can see the place the way we do. We slowed the song down to half-speed and filmed ourselves dancing and singing it that way. Then we doubled the speed of the footage later, so it all has a jittery feel to match the vibe of Jimi’s production. It was a lot of me and Amanda stepping away from family time, setting up the camera and doing our thing, and hurrying off before anyone got too annoyed with us. Only the kids at the campground knew what we were up to, which was funny. I'm still kind of shocked that it worked. Why did you want to capture this psychedelic feel through the video's in-depth edits?
It's just who we are and how we see the world. If it's not psychedelic or dreamlike in some way, it's not really us. Amanda is mostly responsible for that side of the video; I got an edit together of the actual "performance," and she kept piling the other footage on top of it to give it color and motion, and bring it to life. A real limitation of doing this ourselves was having a stationary camera, but all the shaky b-roll footage used as overlays obscures that nicely. We also felt like we’d been hiding behind our artwork in previous releases, and we wanted to put ourselves out there more without sacrificing the aesthetic. I love knowing how Jimi put the track together as a collage from a million different layers, and how the video mirrors that. We put as much work and love into this video as we do in all of our songs.
What's next for you?
We have a video podcast coming out this summer called Bad Trip Reports, which has been bubbling up for years. We're really excited about it. Each episode has us reading someone's experience with various substances, with Amanda providing color commentary. Then we discuss it at the end, with melting op-art behind us the whole time. People can submit their experiences to us, so it has a communal aspect, and it lives in that free-wheeling, Hunter S. Thompson kind of headspace. It's just fun, and it gives us a chance to fully step into the "psychedelic" conversation, rather than just using that word as window-dressing. I love that it swings back and forth between pure, absurdist comedy, and really emotional moments where people are processing loss, meaning, and their place in the world. It's just a topic that we really believe in, so it feels right. We'll also be releasing a full soundtrack to it because we've always wanted to make an ambient record. It's our chance to do a lot of things that we've always wanted to do.