TEN LANDS ___ YATONI
Video game, interactive videoclipYEAR 2020
ART DIRECTION, CGI, PRODUCTION Mélanie Courtinat
ORIGINAL MUSIC, SOUND DESIGN Yatoni
Ten Lands is a hybrid format that oscillates between an interactive video clip and a video game. Each level visually illustrates one of the ten ambient music tracks from Yatoni‘s latest album.
Ten Lands opens, in an underlying way, a double reflexion that crosses both the video game industry and the music industry. This reflexion took place in times where the idea of sound resonated with difficulty in public places, at a time where gatherings were forbidden. It raises the question of new places and new ways of listening to music, far from clubs and concerts.
With Ten Lands, the artist seeks to draw a new diagonal that links the two disciplines of video games and videoclips. By recovering the interactive format of one and the stakes of the other, Ten Lands is a hybrid format in which each sound composition unfolds in relation to a specific virtual place. Landscapes and sounds happen simultaneously. One resonates with the other.
From then on, Ten Lands raises the issue of spatiality when listening to an album. Here the logics of unfolding the musical titles differ from those already in place, especially on streaming platforms such as Spotify or Soundcloud. Indeed, where one click is enough to start the next track, Ten Lands requires a journey.
By including the notion of space, distance and thus chronology, Ten Lands initiates a new logic of filiation when listening to a music album; close to the one, in particular, that animates the vinyl record. In fact, in the same way that the vinyl record requires listening to music one after the other, this new format requires that steps be taken in order to unroll the musical thread, unlike platforms that follow a logic of "deferred" listening, and the possibility of a disorderly discover. Here, this format pushes and gives you the opportunity to go through, literally, Yatoni's album.
Moreover and from another perspective, the artist also made the choice not to always do so. There is one unique entity to browse the ten worlds of Ten Lands. The avatar imagined by the artist is characterized above all by its anonymity. His thick opaque metal armor hides his face but also his gender. Mute, neither his voice nor his gait betray his identity. It is therefore impossible to know his features or the color of his skin. The protagonist of Ten Lands is an avatar who wants to be inclusive, so that anyone can take it over.
