Live Review: Oscar Key Sung shares his Mexico City on 'Club Mate' video

OSCAR KEY SUNG has shared the visuals for ‘Club Mate’, one of the standout singles off his long-awaited return EP, No Disguise. Filmed in Mexico City, where a lot of the EP was conceived and recorded, the visuals offer a glimpse into the world Oscar built during his time in the Mexican capital.

Of the single, Oscar writes that “it’s [about] that vibe of being sober at the club and within an instant an entire dream of being with someone unfolds in your imagination the instant they catch your eye. Within the dancer’s movements is hints of who they are, what they believe in, how they make love etc”. On the visuals for ‘Club Mate’, Oscar uses dance to tell you a story of his Mexico City.

Directed by MAGALY UGARTE, the visuals capture Mexico City in its minutiae as Oscar and his friends find beauty in the city’s peculiarities and it’s charmingly unexplored nooks and crannies. It’s familiar in a way that can only come from knowing a place intimately, of attaching meaning and significance to the details of a place that, when added up all together, constitute a home. It’s less about capturing Mexico City as a fixed geographical place but as a psychological space. It’s more concerned with evoking the atmosphere and the feeling of a hazily-lit indoor basketball court than it is trying to distil the city as a whole.

Ugarte achieves this by focusing in on the shapes, the lights, the colours of the city’s architecture and public artworks. Oscar and his friends dance through these spaces, expressing themselves in intuitive, impressionistic movements. As they do so, they navigate these spaces with a familiarity and an ease that suggests a merging of identities, a lack of distinction between place and individual such that you can't tell where one ends and the other begins.

But still there’s very little in the way of staging or choreography or direction or any of the usual conceit that you’d expect from a music video per se. Instead, ‘Club Mate’ is a deeply personal and candid piece of documentation, radiating with a warm and naturalistic nostalgia. Appropriately, the camera, never fixed, moves much in much the same fashion as Oscar and his friends - freely roaming the space with comfort, following the subjects as if it were an extension of their movements, using this intimacy to bring you into Oscar’s Mexico City.

WORDS BY KYLE FENSOM

IMAGE via. Facebook

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