An office petrified

The first image that matters in Autre Ne Veut’s “Age of Transparency” video is not Arthur Ashin dancing. It is the office around them: a gray corporate habitat whose workers have become chalk-white statues. Desks, partitions, paperwork and fluorescent light remain in place, but the people who should animate the room have been immobilized. Ashin alone moves freely, slipping through the frozen workplace with the playful menace of an intruder who may understand the system better than its occupants do.

Released on September 22, 2015, the video accompanies the title track of Autre Ne Veut’s forthcoming third studio album, due October 2 through Downtown Records. Contemporary reports from The FADER, VICE and Tiny Mix Tapes identify the clip as a collaboration with Yours Truly and WeTransfer. Allie Avital directed it, and filmmaker Ruthie Marantz’s production portfolio records Marantz as producer and lists the same two clients.

Those credits matter because the video belongs to a larger presentation rather than functioning as a detached promotional clip. Tiny Mix Tapes reported that its premiere formed part of a week-long Autre Ne Veut takeover at Yours Truly, accompanied by material about the record-making process and a separately downloadable jazz interpretation of the title song. The campaign treated process, alternate versions and visual identity as interlocking parts of the album’s argument.

Marble people and a Puck-like disturbance

Avital’s visual premise grew directly from the album artwork. In an explanation published by both The FADER and Autre Magazine, the director recalled seeing one of the artwork’s marble figures eating lunch and finding the image simultaneously beautiful and sad. From that starting point, Avital and Ashin developed the idea of a dystopian office populated by petrified businesspeople and visited by a mischievous, Puck-like character.

The resulting film is more unsettling than a simple satire of office conformity. The statues have not been removed from their jobs; they have become permanent fixtures within them. Their gestures survive while their agency does not. A hand remains poised above a keyboard, a body stays arranged for work, and the familiar signs of productivity continue after meaningful action has stopped. The whitened bodies look polished and displayable, as though the employees have been converted into ideal representations of themselves.

Ashin’s character complicates the tableau. The moving figure is not framed as a liberator arriving to restore everyone’s humanity. Instead, Ashin prowls, dances and interferes. The character’s freedom has a cruel edge, and the video gradually makes that mobility feel less like an escape from the office than a different role within its mythology. Avital’s comparison to Puck is apt: the figure introduces disorder, but disorder does not automatically produce justice or release.

That ambiguity prevents “Age of Transparency” from collapsing into a familiar warning about technology making people robotic. The office is undeniably dehumanized, yet the video never supplies a single machine or villain that explains the transformation. Its horror lies in the smoothness of the environment. Everything appears organized, visible and apparently functional. Only the people have hardened.

Pop music that exposes its construction

The title track begins in a different kind of suspended space. Saxophone, piano and layered voices create an almost devotional atmosphere before the arrangement admits clipped percussion, electronic abrasion and abrupt shifts of scale. Ashin’s singing remains the center of gravity: strained, elastic and deliberately exposed, it carries the direct emotional force associated with Autre Ne Veut even as the production repeatedly destabilizes its surroundings.

The disruptions are structural rather than ornamental. A conventional pop mix might use its contrasting textures to guide the listener toward an uncomplicated release. “Age of Transparency” keeps interrupting that promise. Acoustic traces suggest musicians sharing a room, while electronic edits cut that room apart. Harmonies gather around the lead vocal without fully smoothing its roughness. The song can be immediately affecting and difficult to inhabit at the same time.

That design reflects how the album was made. In an August announcement, Resident Advisor reported that Ashin began with performances by a jazz group and then manipulated those recordings at home. Ashin described the players as creating an impression of transparency that is continually disrupted. The same report identifies the album as self-produced, mixed by Tony Maserati and conceived as the second installment in a trilogy about the difficulty of making personal connections in an impersonal era.

Calling the result a jazz album would miss the method. The sessions supplied instability, ensemble timing and sounds produced by bodies responding to one another. Ashin then treated those performances as material that could be cut, displaced and folded into electronic pop. The audible tension is not jazz set against pop in a contest for authenticity. It is a record testing what happens when evidence of live interaction is preserved but denied the comfort of remaining whole.

The title song makes that process unusually legible. Its saxophone can be heard as proof of a performance, yet the track offers no untouched documentary window onto the session. Every apparent glimpse of spontaneity exists inside a constructed mix. The music thereby enacts its own skepticism: it lets the listener hear something that resembles openness while making the mediation impossible to ignore.

After Anxiety, a wider frame

Age of Transparency follows 2013’s Anxiety, the album that moved Autre Ne Veut from relative online anonymity toward a much larger indie audience. In a contemporary Exclaim! interview, Ashin explained that Anxiety was not intended as a literal diagnosis set to music. Its subject was a broader baseline of stress—the ordinary pressures that accumulate through relationships, institutions and daily life. Ashin also described a writing process in which songs existed before studio production began, leaving arrangement and sound design to transform already established compositions.

The new album extends that concern from the feeling of anxiety to the systems through which feeling becomes public. Resident Advisor reported that its title came from marketing jargon, a use of “transparency” in which apparent openness becomes commercially valuable. Ashin’s formulation was pointed: transparency is not a stable condition that the album claims to achieve, but an impossible goal whose pursuit ends in failure.

That distinction is crucial to Autre Ne Veut’s music. Ashin performs with an intensity easily described as confessional, but an expressive voice does not provide unfiltered access to a person. It is still recorded, edited, circulated and interpreted. Once a public performance becomes recognizable as “authentic,” it can turn into another expectation—something an artist must reproduce to remain legible to listeners. “Age of Transparency” does not abandon emotional directness; it surrounds that directness with reminders that every disclosure has a form.

The marble workers embody the same contradiction. They are completely visible and impossible to know. Their surfaces are exposed, yet exposure has made them less human rather than more comprehensible. The office preserves their public poses while withholding whatever interior lives those poses were meant to represent. Ashin’s restless movement supplies an opposing image, but even that movement is theatrical, choreographed and presented for a camera.

The campaign and the critique

There is a productive tension in releasing a song about manufactured openness through an elaborate multimedia campaign. The title-track video arrived with a branded collaboration, an editorial takeover and process-oriented extras—the very mechanisms by which contemporary audiences are invited to feel closer to an artist. Rather than invalidate the song, that context sharpens it. Autre Ne Veut is not pretending to stand outside promotion, platforms or audience feedback. The project works from inside those systems and makes their contradictions part of the presentation.

The video also completes a visual sequence begun with “World War Pt. 2” and “Panic Room.” Contemporary coverage noted that Avital directed all three clips. Each uses a controlled setting and a human body under pressure, but “Age of Transparency” expands the scale from an individual ordeal to an entire workplace mythology. Here the surrounding institution is not merely implied by judges or observers; it has become the world of the film.

What makes the September 22 release feel timely is the precision of that world. The video does not argue that public connection is inherently false, nor does it romanticize a pure private self untouched by presentation. It asks what happens when visibility becomes an obligation and when the performance of candor is rewarded as a marketable trait. Its answer is not a slogan but a set of physical sensations: a voice fighting through a crowded arrangement, live playing fragmented by digital production, and workers made perfectly present by being turned to stone.

“Age of Transparency” is therefore less a promise than a failed experiment staged in pop form. The song reaches for closeness while exposing the machinery of that reach. The video fills an office with immaculate surfaces and finds no genuine openness there. Together they make Ashin’s paradox tangible: the harder a person works to become completely visible, the easier it may be for the surrounding system to mistake the resulting image for the person.