Matteah Baim - “Peach Tree” (Official Video)

One of last year’s most lovely (and most regrettably slept-on) releases was Matteah Baim’s Falling Theater, an album of quietly beautiful folk music featuring collaborations from the likes of Antony Hegarty and MGMT’s James Richardson. For those who aren’t familiar, Baim is an artist who has been releasing gorgeous and occasionally inscrutable records for years now (both as a solo artist and as a member of Metallic Falcons) and has performed and collaborated with everyone from Perfume Genius to Devendra Banhart to Lower Dens to Liturgy to Vashti Bunyan. This week sees the release of a companion video for “Peach Tree,” one of Falling Theater‘s most stunning tracks. Directed by renowned filmmaker Jonathan Caouette (the mad genius responsible for the acclaimed autobiographical documentary Tarnation as well as last year’s mind-bending docu-video for John Grant’s “Glacier”), the clip features footage of Caouette’s own mother having an ambiguously transcendent experience at a cabin tucked away in the woods, which proves to be an inspired pairing for a song that is an almost haiku-like meditation on stillness. Caouette shared a statement about the collaboration:

Matteah’s solo work never fails to move me emotionally. It’s unpredictable and unfailingly moving in all the greatest ways that good music can/should be. I reached into my archive of footage recently and dipped into some outtakes from an experimental film I had been working on a while ago, and repurposed it to marry aspects of it into Matteah’s beautiful, astral song, “Peach Tree.” I am not certain what the actual backstory of the song is, lyrically, but I immediately was able to personalize with the music and lyrics. I used some footage of my dear mom, who has suffered from a severe mental illness most of her life.