Wake Island is composed of Philippe Manasseh and Nadim Maghzal, who self-produced “Nouvelle Vague” between Montreal and New York.
They have released their music video for “Nouvelle Vague”. The English version of the single will be available on March 26, 2021, leading up to the release of the album Born To Leave next spring.
The music video for “Nouvelle vague” addresses the pandemic’s upheaval of our lifestyles. The duo gets introspective about the year 2020 and the events that occurred: a revolution in Lebanon – their country of origin, COVID-19, the rise of social movements such as Black Lives Matter, the confinement, their self-reinvention as musicians in the cloud, social media, etc.
The video accentuates the digital information overflow that we have all been facing on a daily basis since March 2020: events, stories, and news abound. Their conclusion – to surf the wave to come out of this experience stronger and at peace.
Check it out below, and find out more about Wake Island via our Five Questions With segment.
Care to introduce yourself to our readers?
We’re an electronic producer duo in Montreal. We’re both originally from Lebanon
Tell us a bit about your music and writing style.
We love creating unlikely match-ups between musical styles. Lately, we’ve been infusing techno beats into the music that we grew up with, namely Rock, 80s French pop, Eurodance and Arabic music.
Do you have any upcoming shows? For someone who has yet to see you live, how would you explain your live performance?
With Covid-19, we are taking a break from live performance and focusing more on exploring other ways to express ourselves and present our music in the digital world. Our live performances are very energetic, with an element of improvisation, and that’s very hard to recapture without an audience. We love to revisit our songs live, present new versions and we’ve been told many times that no two wake island shows are alike.
If you were asked to suggest only one of your songs for someone to hear, which would it be?
Never Entirely There is a good one to start with. It combines a lot of characteristics of our music in a single pop song.
Canadian Beats is all about Canadian music, so who are your current favourite Canadian bands/ artists?
We love Haviah Mighty, Backwash, Jerusalem in my Heart, Andy Shauf, Hua Li and Nick Schofield.