ARTIST: Peter Gabriel

CREATOR: Ernie Button

SONG: Bread and Wine FROM Passion

Video info

There are musical artists that you connect with at a young age and if you are fortunate enough, they continue to create music as you go through life. Peter Gabriel is one of those artists for me. I can’t remember a time that I haven’t known his music. He has, unknowingly, created a soundtrack for my life.

The imagery that I am using is created through my photography series Vanishing Spirits: The Dried Remains of Single Malt Scotch as well as my travels to Scotland. It is a project that I continue creating images for and have been for the past 17 years. After the last drop of whisky has been consumed, there remains enough information in the residue for these patterns to form. The process from drop to dried image is filled with motion and dynamic patterns that nature brings to us. This video takes the viewer from the micro to macro views of the world through the lens of drying whisky. The first half of the video features the movement of actual drops of whisky drying and the patterns that form in the liquid.  Once the drop reaches a point where it is ready to dry, the “garage door effect” occurs at one side of the drop and moves across the body of liquid, removing all moisture in its wake. 

For the song selection, Peter has so many well-known songs that I wanted a deep cut that would help to complement the type of imagery that I create, forming a true collaboration in the spirit of the 5050 project. Over the decades since the Passion album was released, the music still resonates with me. The song Bread and Wine is meditation to me and nicely complements the meditative movement of the natural world of fluid mechanics.  It feels like the perfect collaboration where the song and the images are trying to support each other.  For the making of this video, I had to listen to the song hundreds of times and every time, as the notes of the tin whistle would fade into the distance, it would leave me with a little more peace, transporting me to another world. 

Early in the Vanishing Spirits project, I started to study images from outer space because my images were naturally taking on an otherworldly feel to them.  I studied planets and shaped my images to closely resemble them. This is my first-time using AI assisted videos and I really wanted to make sure it represented my photography in an authentic way. All of my AI videos were based on images that I created in my photography studio or took on my travels to Scotland.  The red planet seen moving through space is a planet I created with the dried remains of a drop of 50 year old whisky.  Both the song and the images attempt to transport the viewer to another place. 

Song info:

Bread and Wine is a track taken from Peter Gabriel's album Passion, released in 1989. The album was the first release on the newly formed Real World Records.

Written by Peter Gabriel. Produced by Peter Gabriel

Published by Real World Music Ltd. / Sony Music Publishing.

‘Scorsese had asked for a new type of score that was neither ancient nor modern, that was not a pastiche but had clear references to the region, traditions and atmospheres, but was in itself a living thing.’