More about: The Orielles

The Orielles are the band that everyone’s watching at the moment...and today that becomes literal. The band’s legacy has bloomed through the eyes of up-and-coming film photographers for years now, and they have decided to switch it up for the one year anniversary of being in lockdown by releasing their own film, titled La Vita Olistica.

For the past year-and-a-bit, The Orielles have been hard at work, imagining the possibilities of what they could do that wasn't what everyone else was doing. What was born from The Orielles’ lockdown is a magnificent piece of film, inspired by their real-life friends and the televised moon landing.

The film is also a re-imagination of last year's album Disco Volador, which has been re-scored to soundtrack the film. In a time when bands are stuck indoors and feeling like they have nothing to do, The Orielles have truly taken a giant leap for bandkind.

Rebelling against the digital world we're living in at the moment, they’ve compressed their response to their album in the most but least analogue way possible, a physical but virtual film titled ‘La Vita Olistica’. 

Here's what the trio of Esme and Sidonie Hand-Halford and Henry Carlyle-Wade had to say about La Vita Olistica...

Esme: It's mad! A huge learning curve. It was born out of a time when we've all been feeling super creative and also turning to different interdisciplinary media styles to try and incorporate into our vision of being in a band. So yeah: it's been a really mad time for creativity but also it has been a huge tough process, getting to the final finished product.

Esme: The initial idea behind it was extending the life of Disco Volador to not just be forgotten and wrapped up neatly with just one record. And also, coupled with that is that lockdown was a massive time without live gigs and cinema and stuff, so being immersed within art and being able to experience it in quite a sensory way was lost. We were really combining those ideas to get this film together.

Even when we were filming it, it worked perfectly without us having to ask anyone to do anything. 

Henry: There's a point about livestreams versus film in our heads: there's no longevity to a livestream. That died out super quick and a lot of them were not really worth your time. This whole concept for the film started with wanting it to become all of our gigs for a year, and it was our whole live output for Disco Volador because of the pandemic. And that's the way it lives on.

Sid: We've definitely got plans to take it further and even more immersive than it already is...just having all the artwork and the projections up around us as we're playing the score live. And then people can kind of walk around and view both and it won't be like a traditional gig where people just stand and watch the band, it's like the band almost as it is in the film, would become secondary to the art itself.

Esme: We were thinking early on [in lockdown], about when live events first became a thing in the 1960s. I was reading something about the moon landing and how to bring together audiences around TV screens at that moment in time, and trying to compare that to how desensitised we've become now.

It's a rebellion that satisfies the idea of a sensory overload but in a different way.Hopefully it's more of a fully embodied sensory overload rather than something just for the eyes and that you can shut your laptop screen after [watching]” 

Henry: It’s about being more meaningful with your output, I think, and taking control of it rather than setting up an iPhone camera and playing a shitty cover just because you feel like you should.

Sid: I think one of the main things that people have missed is going and wandering around art galleries and things like that and therefore having the film be that as well that kind of gallery experience, kind of tapped into that idea of it being an immersive and sensory overload but again being something that we hope everyone will really appreciate because they've been missing it alot.”

Experience a sneak preview premiere of the film tomorrow (26 March) at 10.30am by following this link. 'La Vita Olistica' is to be shown in cinemas, venues & surprise spaces this summer.

More about: The Orielles