Video premiere: Rows Arc, ‘High on the Tide’

Kevin Bronson on March 19th, 2019

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Rows Arc is a trio fronted by Sarah Olmsted, a Los Angeles-based artist who came to music after forays into other disciplines such as sculpture, furniture building and museum exhibit design. Joined by Jason Gagovski (of Chicago’s Sweet Cobra) and Neeraj Kane (The Hope Conspiracy), Olmsted presides over painterly, experimental folk-pop accented by synths and production flourishes. The results are ethereal, mesmerizing and transformative.

The music on Rows Arc’s debut album “High on the Tide” (out March 29) orbits the worlds inhabited by artists such as Mazzy Star, Julia Holter, Mount Eerie and Deradoorian. The album’s first single “Some Days” bathes Olmsted’s emotions in warm acoustic guitar, but the title track is something different: a pulsing and incantational meditation on life’s cycles, with Olmsted’s vocals flitting around tribal drums.

While the song uses the ocean as a metaphor for those cycles, the video for “High on Tide” — directed by the artist and filmed by Chris Turiello — finds Olmsted seeking answers among the Desert X art installations in the Coachella Valley. Hers is a quest worth following.

“In the desert, time is a circular construct, filled with desolation and magical thinking,” she says. “To find your way out, you might have to go further in.”

||| Watch: The video for “High on the Tide”