With the expansive new single and video “Never Learned,” the ambient electronica duo of ATTLAS and Richard Walters, known as Sun Lo, offers another look into their debut album, Shapes in My Mind. Walters‘ futuristic and soaring vocals take the place of feathery synths and simple beats.
The unorthodox love ballad “Never Learned,” which expands on the record’s bigger themes and draws inspiration from Kazuo Ishiguro’s science fiction book Klara and the Sun, was written from the perspective of an AI. Sun Lo explores how technology interacts with the human world in a similar way to the book. Despite this, the song’s message—to reach out to a loved one—is a timeless one that has the power to go beyond the specifics of the piece.
Never Learned is a love song about reassuring the person you hold closest to your heart, even when they’re pushing you away and rejecting your words. Again, coming from an AI point of view, it’s a naive look at love and the roles of a relationship, but not dependent on that concept. – Sun Lo
Jordan Martin directed a captivating music video that goes along with the release. It was filmed at Keepers Pond in Wales which Martin recalls feeling “like the edge of the world.”
I wanted to combine the elements of love, communication and hyperreality and blend them together in an abstract way… Using a process called slit-scanning, used by Stanley Kubrick in ‘2001 Space Odyssey’, we took a single slice of time and stretched it out to create distorted parallel visuals. This process displays time in a completely different way, opening up different ways of interpreting the movements. – ATTLAS
“Never Learned” is the next single from the duo’s debut album Shapes In My Mind, which is due out on April 28th via Nettwerk. Other recent singles include “Heights,” “Nothing Permanent,” and “Factory Gates.”
