THE AVALANCHES
The Divine Chord
In collaboration with The Avalanches, artist and director Jonathan Zawada and director Michael Dole created The Divine Chord — a film about the moment, in childhood, when the world first opens. Before knowing becomes naming. Before the sky becomes a ceiling. When music, light, and the strange beauty of being alive arrive all at once, and we have no idea yet what to do with any of it.
A divine chord is what happens when separate frequencies become a single voice. The song does it across three artists — Avalanches, MGMT, Johnny Marr — each carrying their own signal, all of them aligning on one note. The film does it across a single child's wonder. The album that holds the song, We Will Always Love You, was built around the Golden Records launched on Voyager in 1977 — twelve inches of music sent past the edge of the solar system, in case anyone, anywhere, was listening. The same instinct lives inside a child looking up at the sky. Is anyone out there. What is all of this. How am I here.
The film answers in kind. Worlds within worlds. Colour bleeding into colour. The cosmos held inside the curiosity of someone who hasn't yet learned what curiosity is. The sample-based logic of The Avalanches becomes the visual grammar — fragments of the universe gathered and tuned until they ring together inside a single child's eye.
A film about the wonder we are born with. A signal sent, in case anyone is listening.