Granny Smith is the brainchild of Toronto born musician Jason Bhattacharya whose main focus is production, songwriting and recording. Bhattacharya has been featured on umpteen records as a session musician and producer and has also worked in the music department for Netflix, Sony Pictures and Paramount Television Studios over the last three years.

“Egypt” is the latest and greatest release from the Granny Smith universe. Something a little different and a bit more unsettled. Layering a variety of instruments (acoustic guitar, rickenbacker bass, piano, wah guitar, bongos, tambourine, shakers), Bhattacharya played the acoustic guitar solo overtop before finally recording the drums.

The single’s accompanying visuals are by artist and creative technologist Dan Tapper. Created using a combination of traditional and contemporary techniques, the initial inspiration came from a series of film photographs and super8 stills shared by Bhattacharya. Tapper loved the texture and colour reproduction in these images and explored a combination of stop motion animation techniques fused with an AI image generator called StableDiffusion. This allowed him to create hybrid digital versions of these images departing from their initial form, taking us on a journey of continuous grainy, displaced zooms and rotoscoped flickering textures.

Thanks for listening! Click here to find out more about Granny Smith, grab photos + social links.

1. Tell us the story of this song, why did you choose to visualize this song specifically? 

I wanted to do something a little different than my last releases which are more singer-songwriter based. I was more focused on creating a mood. I layered a variety of instruments (acoustic guitar, rickenbacker bass, piano, wah guitar, bongos, tambourine, shakers) then played the acoustic guitar solo over that. The final thing I recorded was the drums. The song was recorded to a Yamaha AW4416 recording console. I felt that this song told a story that was vivid enough to not include lyrics.  To me, it seemed to breathe & be more of a conversation between the acoustic guitar solo & the drums that doesn’t quite settle until the last 30 seconds. I thought it would be interesting to take it one step further & pair the sonic journey with a variety of photos & super 8 stills i’d taken. For the most part the pictures were of landscapes & buildings. 

2.What was the inspiration behind this video (visuals, storyline, etc.)? 

My music is my life in sound. I thought it would be interesting to see if the images in the music could be furthered by adding a video that was as experimental as this piece was. I reached out to Daniel Tapper to create this video.

3.What was the process of making this video?

“The visuals for Egypt are created using a combination of traditional and contemporary techniques. The initial inspiration came from a series of film photographs and super8 stills shared by Jason. I loved the texture and color reproduction in these images and explored a combination of stop motion animation techniques combined with an AI image generator called StableDiffusion. This allowed me to create hybrid digital versions of these images departing from their initial form and taking us on a journey of continuous grainy, displaced zooms and rotoscoped flickering textures.” – Daniel Tapper