ARTIST: Peter Gabriel

CREATOR: Daniel Leighton

SONG: Playing for Time (Bright-Side Mix) FROM i/o

Video info:

I’ve been drawn to the concept of memory for as long as I can remember. In my teens, I wrote essays and created diagrams exploring how memory works. Around that same time, I built my first database— an early attempt at organising and making sense of what we hold onto and what we lose. My art, my programming, and my healing have all lived in that same territory: how we store experience, how it shifts, how it lives not just in the mind but in the body.

‘Playing for Time’ struck me the first time I heard it—an unfinished version at the Hollywood Bowl in 2012, with wordless vocalizations and fragments of sound. Even without lyrics, it resonated deeply. It stayed with me. When the final version was released, it carried an emotional landscape that felt uncannily familiar. It echoed something I’ve lived with: the complexity of time, memory, and the spaces in between.

To explore that, I began with three of my original paintings. They served as emotional anchors, but also as the foundation for much of the imagery—created in Procreate, adjusted in Photoshop, and then fed through AI tools like Deforum and Kaiber to generate video content. The resulting footage was layered and transformed further through an intensive editing process in Final Cut Pro. I iterated on the material multiple times—generating, reworking, compositing—trying to reach a place where the imagery sparked real feeling in me. Each pass deepened the emotional texture of the piece.

There’s a kind of emotional territory I return to in my work—a feeling I don’t always have words for, but I know it in my body. This video touches that place. It’s about memory. About time. About the things we carry and the things we come back to. And maybe, in that return, something softens. Maybe we find a kind of presence. Maybe we find ourselves.

Song info:

Playing for Time is a track taken from Peter Gabriel's album i/o, released on 1 December 2023. This is the Bright-Side Mix, by Mark ‘Spike’ Stent.

Words and music by Peter Gabriel. Produced by Peter Gabriel.

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

Some songs arrive very quickly, Playing for Time was not one of those. I had been working on it, on and off, for several years and have sometimes performed it live, without lyrics.

It's about time, mortality and memories and the idea that each of us has a planet full of memories which get stashed inside the brain. Just like the hit songs of their youth which trigger extraordinary responses in dementia patients, I am fascinated by the mechanisms, smells and sounds which allow memories to reopen.

-pg