Watch Amamelia's Animated Video For New Single 'The Floating Opera'

Wednesdays are officially cool again, as we celebrate a new single from Best Electronic Artist Tūī winner Amamelia aka Amelia Berry and accompanying animated video by Simon Ward. Citing such figures as Ryuichi Sakamoto, Martin Denny and Gilberto Gil with Os Mutantes amongst "stuff I was into" while creating 'The Floating Opera', the Naarm-based Aotearoa producer / composer's instrumental track is a joyously imaginative journey through spacey electronica, seriously butt-wiggling synth-boogie, proggy (froggy?) rock jamouts, and soothing sounds from the great outdoors.

Not unlike a tag team wrestling combo, director / animator Simon Ward taps in to take Amamelia's tune to even higher heights, made with support from NZ On Air, with additional logo design work by Ashley Brown. We follow an adventuresome musical collective from humble community market show beginnings, to new agey TV show appearance (where the hairy trio rightly state "a song can be a rainbow"), riverside noodling, curbside jams and big stage adoration, proudly taking their sound to settings familiar to local touring artists.

Visually in tune with Aotearoa's own Woolly Valley, The Magic Roundabout and "a rare Pentangle performance on the British TV show, Journey Into Love from 1971", experience the magnificence of 'The Floating Opera' out today via Sunreturn...

"I wanted the song to be sweaty and humid. The Floating Opera started life inspired by Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Rydeen but it was sounding much too clean and punchy. I redid all the synths to be big, munty 70s sounds and added grubby layers of atmosphere.

The name of the song comes from a book I was reading, but it's not really anything to do with the content of the book, more so about an image of a cruise down a river, the humidity, the sound, the mix of hot and cool." - Amamelia

"Like with the Colourbox video we chatted enthusiastically about style and influences that we both love. We went through collage animation techniques, to 70s English kids shows and a long time spent watching youtube videos from the medieval music historian David Munrow. The process involved a lot of sharing links from the amazing info libraries on Audioculture and NZonScreen too.

There's a bit of Aotearoa music history in there and some iconic public performance locations from around the country. I also imagined idealistic spots a band might play doing a tour around Aotearoa in the 70s.

For the design of the characters we kept talking about old kids shows like the Magic Roundabout and Amelia spoke of Fingerbobs, so we kinda mashed that sort of inspiration together and combined it with the crafty textures and collage looks of some more modern console games, making sure there was a lot of fabrics and wool involved, but maybe more like photos of those textures. It's a real wandering mashup!" - Simon Ward

'The Floating Opera' is out today digitally via Sunreturn.