Samana are Rebecca Rose Harris and Franklin Mockett, a musical and creative duo with both hands in every aspect of the creative process. The couple have travelled extensively throughout Europe, before settling in rural Wales to record their album. Exclusively for Hook, Rebecca wrote about the making of their latest video for the track Harvest.

 

Before our ancestors knew the rain would fall, they would conduct ceremonious dances through the ritual of unanimous movement, which would last many days. Dancing as one, they would weave between sleep and movement until the rain would fall. This act of ceremony and dance paired with belief, is a powerful contribution to human connection and to our sense of belonging within our immediate environment.

 

The innate difficulty of experiencing the present is one of the greatest conflicts of our time, as we find ourselves obstructed by the many distractions that are woven into the fabric of contemporary infrastructure and society, which surround us day to day. Our single Harvest, in its own nature, stems from a grounding notion of recognising, yielding and replenishing something that we all depend on - Ourselves. An ode to the act of moving beyond the physical weight we each carry, it is a process of shedding, much like the butterfly from its cocoon, or the falling fruit from the tree. With each experience we grow and as these experiences accumulate, we change. Our past is a tapestry of time, a balance of weight and of lightness. Sometimes it is necessary to abandon, sometimes it is necessary to embrace and sometimes it is necessary to step beyond. To truly recognise our reflection beyond flesh, we must render to feeling and to the subconscious. ‘A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systemised disorganisation of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself.’ - Arthur Rimbaud. 

 

The video to ‘Harvest’ was an attempt to capture one of the fundamental concepts behind the album Ascension: the transitioning between one plain of consciousness to another. Filmed over the duration of two hours, orchestrated with the intention of removing each individual from their conscious state of awareness, to a state of catharsis and transcendence, we created a musical environment that shifted between five notions. Through documenting the language of movement that became the immediate dialogue of their subconscious, we witnessed the collective ascension of the group, as they passed into an altered state; a higher frequency and dimension of being and energy. This becoming of the environment, gives an opportunity to step past conscious thought and ‘be here now.’

 

No-one involved had participated in an experiment such as this before, and what I find most revealing is the portraits that begin and end the video. The eyes of each individual are the raw representations of their inner state. The atmosphere of tender vulnerability, so present at the beginning dissolves into a poignant atmosphere of acceptance and zen at the end. At the close of these two hours, when one by one, each individual stepped through the black velvet curtains and back into themselves, you could feel the energy had changed, as if the space became a ley line, charged by electromagnetism.