24/09/2025
Amamelia has bestowed on us 'The Floating Opera', the first single from a new body of work due for release in 2026. The Floating Opera sees Amamalia return to work with director Simon Ward on a new video that is made with help from Ashley Brown and NZ On Air Music!
📹 https://youtu.be/AgaKhwIKp9I
🔗 https://amamelia.bandcamp.com/
🔈 https://music.drm.co.nz/the-floating-opera
The Floating Opera starts with an atmosphere of stridulating insects and croaking frogs before descending into a joyous cacophony of galloping high hats, tin whistles and big squelchy synth melody (like the ones you’d find on a junk-shop Moog record).
“I wanted the song to be sweaty and humid,” says Amamelia. “The Floating Opera started life inspired by Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Rydeen but it was sounding much too clean and punchy. I redid all the synths to be big, munty 70s sounds and added grubby layers of atmosphere.”
“The name of the song comes from a book I was reading, but it's not really anything to do with the content of the book, more so about an image of a cruise down a river, the humidity, the sound, the mix of hot and cool.”
The Floating Opera sees Amamaliea reunite with animator Simon Ward for the visual accompaniment (the pair previously worked together on Colourbox). The Floating Opera has additional logo design work by Ashley Brown and was made with assistance from NZ on Air Music. The video is a montage of an experience that never existed, inspired by music tours and a fantasy of what that might have been like in an idealised version of Aotearoa's past. The video takes inspiration from children's shows Woolly Valley, old New Zealand Pop Music Shows and a rare Pentangle performance on the British TV show, 'Journey Into Love' from 1971.
“I had an electric first listen to the song,” notes Simon. “I loved the upbeat and original sounds and it really took me on a trip that inspired the journey of the video.”
“Like with the Colourbox video we chatted enthusiastically about style and influences that we both love. We went through collage animation techniques, to 70s English kids shows and a long time spent watching youtube videos from the medieval music historian David Munrow. The process involved a lot of sharing links from the amazing info libraries on Audioculture and NZonScreen too.
“There's a bit of Aotearoa music history in there and some iconic public performance locations from around the country. I also imagined idealistic spots a band might play doing a tour around Aotearoa in the 70s.”
“For the design of the characters we kept talking about old kids shows like the Magic Roundabout and Amelia spoke of Fingerbobs, so we kinda mashed that sort of inspiration together and combined it with the crafty textures and collage looks of some more modern console games, making sure there was a lot of fabrics and wool involved, but maybe more like photos of those textures. It's a real wandering mashup!”
Amamelia reflects “I think the video really expresses a lot of how I feel about music in general. Simon is incredible, its always a joy to work with him.”
With the release of the song, Amamelia admits she's feeling “honestly, kinda terrified.”
“People always tell you to just make the music that you want to make. Well, being incredibly bloody minded, I’ve never needed that advice. But, it always make actually releasing that music feel like a bit of a gamble. I just hope everybody else likes sweaty faux-tropical synth disco as much as I do.”
