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Watch Anika’s Dreamy, Foreboding ‘I Go to Sleep’ Video

anika, i go to sleep

In SPIN’s recent cover story on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, frontwoman Karen O and guitarist Nick Zinner agreed that two albums provided the ever-adaptable trio with the most inspiration while they crafted their latest LP, Mosquito: Kanye West’s insta-classic My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Anika, the self-titled 2010 debut album from the Berlin/Bristol-based singer. Zinner described both touchstones as records that “jumped out as being totally fucking outsider, left-of-the-box music. They didn’t sound like anything else that I’d heard.”

Anika will issue another collection of noir-flavored oddities on April 16 when Stones Throw Records releases the Anika EP, produced by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow. In advance of the short-player’s debut, SPIN is premiering the video for “I Go to Sleep,” a séance-ready reverie that’s been translated to film by German director Uli M. Schueppel (who helmed the 1990 Nick Cave tour documentary The Road to God Knows Where). Shut-eye-obsessed lyrics aside, this three-and-a-half-minute clip maintains a dreamlike aura, blending fuzzy, out-of-focus visuals with footage of shady forests in Brandenburg and a mysterious recurring image of a white robed figure, standing alone in a rowboat, awaiting the journey ahead.