Forest Swords unveils stirring video from Black Swan choreographer Benjamin Millepied

Hailing from The Wirral near Liverpool, talented young producer Forest Swords released one EP, 2010's mucg-lauded Dagger Paths, before signing to Brooklyn experimental electronic label Tri-Angle, and releasing his critically-acclaimed full-length debut, Engravings. Drawing on a rich reserve of atmospheric, instrumental hip-hop, pastoral found sounds and mutated vocal samples, the album marked Matthew Barnes out as a producer to watch, alongside fellow British Tri-Angle signings The Haxan Cloak and Holy Other.

This week, he has revealed a new video for one of the album's standout tracks, Weight of Gold, and is offering up the track for free download via his website in exchange for an email address. Later this year, he will come to Glasgow for this year's Stag and Dagger one-day festival, performing on 4 May.

The video for Weight of Gold was directed by Benjamin Millepied, who worked as the choreographer on Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, and has just been appointed the new director of dance at the Paris Opera Ballet. Millepied comments: "Choreography and directing film connect, they are inseparable for me. In this film the camera is a simple observer. The point was to present Billy in the most pure and direct way possible. It is a portrait."

Barnes, meanwhile, is pleased with the results his director achieved, saying: "The locations Benjamin picked for this video really resonated with me. I've always associated the songs on Engravings with the British landscape - woodland and sandstone, because that's the environment I live in and produced the record in - but taking the music out of that context and placing it in Israel shifts the track in a direction I didn't expect."

Speaking to Nowness, who premiered the video today, Barnes continues: "I grew up listening to a lot of mainstream pop music, and I was fascinated with the production and structure of it. Then I gradually got into punk, hip-hop and electronic music. All that filters into the type of sounds, melodies and textures I’m attracted to now, though it’s difficult to be objective about that kind of thing when you’re making it. The track The Weight of Gold came together fairly slowly. I pieced it together over a few weeks, adding and subtracting until it felt right, and I mixed it outdoors like the rest of the record."