[Cover image is a still from “Stay Sane” video by Colton Van Til]

Plato III, aka Plato The Third, is the multigenre project of LA-based and West Texas-raised rapper and songwriter Ryan Silva. He has released “Stay Sane (feat. Bei Bei)”, the latest single from his upcoming album arriving via Polyvinyl Record Co. It’s accompanied by an official music video.

The song’s rhythm was constructed by Producer Philip Odom (Ceremony, Militarie Gun), and it features Chinese Guzheng virtuoso and string player, Bei Bei Monter, better known as Bei Bei. The guzheng (“goo-jung” / 古筝) is a Chinese stringed instrument whose origin dates to the Qin dynasty, roughly 2,250 years ago, and can have as many as 26 strings.

Speaking to the collaboration and meaning behind the track, Silva shares:

One of the world’s best string instrument players doing her thing on this. One of my proudest moments. I just try to stay out the way, but really meditate on the personal toll that capitalism takes on me in a consumer culture. It’s inescapable and casts a heavy shadow. Hard to defeat, we are left with trying to maintain.

The song’s music video, directed by Colton Van Til for Cloudstar Pictures, was captured in Isamu Noguchi’s California Scenario, a sculpture garden based in Costa Mesa, 40 miles south of Plato’s home of Los Angeles.

As Van Til explains:

…it felt like the perfect setting for this piece. I drew much of the video’s inspiration from Noguchi’s work – particularly the way the garden offers a striking sense of calm and simplicity, nestled among towering financial high-rises. That tension between serenity and surrounding pressure echoed the lyrics of Ryan’s song, which meditate on the struggle to maintain your sanity in the midst of late-stage capitalism.