V’s Layover: between dream and reality, outside the boundaries of time
Layover, V’s first solo album, is brief: six songs, including two versions of one of the tracks, spread over 18 minutes of music. An assured mixture of slow-tempo soul, jazz and R&B, Layover covers deep ground musically and narratively. The title Layover suggests an in-between time for slowing down and reflection; V’s stories are about love: relationships that have ended but remain unresolved, wistful daydreaming, relationships that seem to be slipping away. His album captures a languid, beautiful longing–intense but vague feelings that dissolve gently into the late afternoon sun.
V’s Layover feels like a natural extension from “Vante,” the name V started to use to sign his colorful abstract paintings and photography, but that also encompasses his love of visual arts, classical music, art-house films, and European culture and fashion. His 2023 photofolio, a project where each BTS member designed a book capturing concepts that reflect their personality, also showed V recreating various fashion historical periods. The album combines all these elements to create a world reflecting V’s unique artistic imagination.
Layover’s musical landscape is enriched by five videos, one for each song on the album. The videos are distinct, there is no continuity between one or the other. But, just like the album, they create a cohesive narrative of longing while expanding it to include ideas about how love, or its complex adjacent emotions, impacts our perception, memory, and even imagination. V’s layover is a pause or rest between parts of a journey. V has said that when selecting the songs for the album, he “gathered all the tracks that fit the title Layover the best.” Fittingly, the videos seem to exist in a liminal time and even outside of time where there is no way to tell the hour of the day or how many days, repetitive in their mundanity, have gone by.
A recurrent theme in the videos for “Love Me Again” and “Slow Dancing” is the juxtaposition between nature and technology: a noraebang set-up in a cave in “Love Me Again,” or characters using computers at the beach, motion capture, and animation in “Slow Dancing.” The video for “Rainy Days” also has almost imperceptible visual effects, such as the rewinding effect as V pours what looks like sugar into a bowl. These objects or effects are subtly incongruous — while sequins and old TV sets are clearly out of place in a stalactites-filled cave, it’s not obvious at first that what we are seeing in “Slow Dancing,” may not be fully real. There’s a similar feeling in “Rainy Days,” where V’s character seems to be acting scenes from his imagination or memory as he goes about his day in his apartment.
The album also bears this contradiction: V’s choices in classic sounds like a jazz piano or flute, in addition to his luxurious baritone, are juxtaposed with distortion, vocal effects, ambient sounds and electronic beats. Much like the videos, V’s aesthetic is a mixture of sounds and styles that evoke the past and the present, the organic and the inorganic, the real and the imaginary.
In these three videos, we also see V the artist in the creation process. In “Love Me Again,” he is crafting a performance — his sequined top, impeccable makeup, and almost overly polished look emphasize the artificiality of this strange subterranean arrangement.
In “Slow Dancing” and “Rainy Days,” he is an artist simultaneously building and inhabiting the world that we see on screen: V uses motion caption to record his body and the dance moves that we immediately see him use in his freestyle dance at the beach, or V paints a self-portrait, in a glass or mirror no less, in “Rainy Days.” He sculpts, photographs, paints, selects — he is an artist bringing into being worlds that exist in his imagination, perhaps even crafting idealized versions of his world or himself.
This imaginary world is expanded in the video for “Blue.” This is the most distinct video, a black and white mini short film depicting a clear narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. In it, we see V driving around, knocking on someone’s door, looking for the spare key under a planter as he tries to control his angst and frustration. It’s a gorgeous video, reminiscent of the films of the French New Wave (I’m thinking about Jean-Luc Goddard’s Breathless [1960] in particular)–beautifully framed black and white images shot handheld camera style capturing the simple narrative in a non-linear, disjointed way that emphasizes the constructed nature of time.
In the video for “Blue,” these elements mix to create an intriguing anachronistic world where V is dressed as a 1970s or 1980s punk/glam rock star who lives in a landscape evocative of 1960s French cinema while making a call on a 2020s smartphone. It’s a natural extension of V’s interest in exploring the past through his love of jazz and vintage clothing styles and music.
The concept of time, whether in terms of thinking about the past, or the pace of life in the present, seems to be important for V. That’s one of the reasons he has said that “Slow Dancing” is his favorite song on Layover: “My favorite is ‘Slow Dancing,’ he told IU on his visit to her show IU Palette. “I don’t think I ever got to express my personality through music; I’m always a bit slow in my actions and words. I try to keep up with the tough choreography [as part of BTS] but I think I’m a bit slow. However, I love and like that about me… ‘Slow Dancing’ since I like dancing slowly.”
Layover was released in September 2023, two months before V enlisted to fulfill his mandatory military service. After a decade as one-seventh of BTS, the temporary pause the group took in June 2022 to work on solo music and eventually enlist is a poignant example of a layover for V–a time to take stock of the past, slow down and consider where he may be going artistically in the future.
The final video for Layover is “For Us,” the last song on the album. While equally languorous as the previous songs, in “For Us,” the beautiful, sensual longing of the “Slow Dancing” and “Rainy Days” is tinged with regret. Musically, the song is the most experimental, with voice distortion and rewinding effects layered on top of a stark piano. The video is an epilogue, a montage of images from all the other videos mixed with behind-the-scenes footage. Interspersed among the footage are new scenes from the different characters V has played in the videos, blurring the line between reality and performance, between Kim Taehyung as V, between V playing a character and the characters themselves. It all makes sense in the artistic universe V has created; in Layover it feels like he has finally found the right tempo to express his interior life.
Layover was released on September 8, 2023.
— Andreina (Thank you to Kim for her illuminating editing).
