Denai Moore 'Cascades' through Surreal Environments in Fantastical Video

Samuel Douek directs Denai Moore's latest music video for her latest single Cascades.

It’s with this new single that Moore’s troubled, troubling worldview is so perfectly encapsulated. As she sings about getting engulfed in sadness and depression, the sonic background shifts from optimistic to ominous, ending in a haunting, slowed down outro. The video too, is equal parts nightmarish and surrealist, fantastical and bizarre, with Moore searching for a way out of a dystopian maze, before finally freeing herself.

Denai on the promo and her inspirations: “I really wanted the Cascades video to translate like a weird, surreal dream. The song is about feeling visceral sadness and being too caught up in your own headspace.

"Sam and I collaborated on the concept of me literally melting myself as a kind of metaphorical self-destruction. Sam cast my face the night before the shoot and it really put me into the headspace of the world we were creating.

"Sonically this song was tricky to work on. Alex and I did a lot of crazy modular twisted noises, but ended up stripping it back and have tinkles of noise in the song. In the ending of the song, we actually slow it down a couple of bpm and the outro is a cappella.”

Director Samuel Douek adds: “With Cascades, we follow Denai as she descends into deeper levels of her subconscious. She is both trying to lose herself in this bizarre world and looking to find herself by uncovering her own face (or mask) which ultimately frees her from her mind.

"I was very much inspired by surrealist films from the 1930s and high fashion photographers like Tim Walker and approached the film from an architectural perspective, planning a large scale inflatable in which to house the different distorted domestic scenes.”