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"Amour, t'es là?" from Amour, t'es là?
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NPR All Songs Considered, Feature >>

As this summer lopes towards its inevitable close, we're still hankering for one last dose of a day at the beach: bright, sunny, full of daytime languor and the tantalizing promise of a fabulous night. And what sates that desire perfectly is the totally charming tune "Ce Soir" ("Tonight"), from the New York-based group Banda Magda.

The band is fronted by Greek singer and composer Magda Giannikou, an artist who fires on all artistic cylinders. Her own musical output spans everything from this breezy French-Brazilian hybrid to a with the Kronos Quartet, to composing music for (and singing with) . But she also co-directed this video with Greek filmmaker Ilias Papaioannou, who lives in the northern city of Thessaloniki.

They shot "Ce Soir" last month at a beach in northern Greece, on the Chalkidiki peninsula — on (what else) but a perfect summer day. "A little bit of blue, a little bit of red/Tonight, we're painting love/Black and gray are forbidden," Giannikou sings in French. Those reds and blues are just the colors that pop out from the brilliant blaze of late-afternoon sun that Giannikou and Papaioannou managed to capture.

"In my head, I had always visualized this song in a seaside setting, really capturing the beauty of the Greek coastline," Giannikou explains by email. "Ilias suggested a technique called lens whacking, where you detach the lens from the camera so that light can flare between the lens and the sensor."

 08/30/13 >> go there
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