Text by Meritxell Rosell
A soft gesture crosses a ray of light streaming through a window; the grainy detail of the carpet where someone sits; friendly faces and inquisitive questions; delicate reminders of paths that intersect, shared experiences that touch deep, stories that somehow remain connected through the years, even as distance grows. From this sense of lingering connections emerges a collaboration between two of the most interesting artists shaping London’s current experimental scene.
Visual and sound artist Richie Culver and video artist and filmmaker Rebecca Salvadori join forces on a video for Some Stories Linger, a track from Culver’s album I TRUST PAIN, his debut on Rainy Miller’s Fixed Abode label at the end of 2025. The album is a fine example of what’s been described as the neo northern gothic.
For this collaboration, Culver reached out to Salvadori with the proposal of creating a visual response to one of the album’s tracks. He had long admired her work (particularly her collaborations with Coby Sey and Saint Abdullah). With much of the record leaning heavily into trap and drill, Culver was drawn to the possibility of a more academic, even melancholic interpretation. He didn’t give Salvadori any direction; he wanted to see which track, if any, resonated with her instinctively and let the process unfold.
Salvadori gravitated towards Some Stories Linger, a track imbued with a distinctly northern sensitivity and longing. She mentioned that, since both artists’ paths first crossed, she felt an unspoken sense of familiarity with Culver… a quiet connection. When Culver reached out to ask if she’d be up for making a video, she was intrigued but also unsure how to approach it. The way it developed couldn’t have been more attuned.
At the time she got Culver’s invite, Salvadori was leading the visiting artist studio at FAVU, University of the Arts in Brno, Czech Republic. One of the exercises she was carrying out in her lectures involved students selecting a video camera they felt drawn to for any reason and using it to film one another, not only to explore how they felt but also to get to know one another as a group. Speaking with Salvadori, she mentions that, since she had all the footage from that class on her laptop, she started browsing some of it while trying to edit it together with Some Stories Linger. Immediately, she realised it was a perfect match.
What followed outstretched beyond. Salvadori invited her students to develop the project further as part of their final semester examination. Six participants responded, working within a loose framework: to use only existing footage from their shared time, which could be supplemented by new material reflecting themselves or others within the group of six students. The music video became an occasion to reflect on this very specific moment of their lives and the relationships they’ve built over the six months together. Salvadori also made a video herself.
The students’ distinct sensibilities are present in each of the videos’ arching structure, yet they all feel connected; they share a lingering story, plus Rebecca’s personal, sharp view on intimacy, that of the people she has in front of her camera, always in dialogue with her, her very unique way of artistic expression, is infused across the full sequence.
Salvadori herself reflects: Over the past years, my video work has been deeply intertwined with my own life and relationships, an archive of moments and conversations with musicians, from which I assemble films of varying lengths, independent of any specific track. I don’t follow the structure or timing of a single piece of music; sometimes, the sounds from these encounters and recordings become new music for the film itself. In my work, image and sound are inseparably linked. They exist in parallel, and it’s the nature of each collaboration or friendship that guides the film’s direction and form.
Even Culver mentions how much sense the choice made to him: a track that inhabits a space shaped by failed friendships and relationships that slowly faded away without any obvious reason, almost imperceptibly over time: I’ve come to realise I tend to distance myself when people get too close. It’s not out of malice, but more a kind of reflexive self-protection, or maybe a fear of intimacy that I haven’t yet fully understood. Some Stories Linger sits inside that emotional terrain: a sense of detachment that’s not dramatic, but quiet, slow, and slightly numbing. The kind of loss that doesn’t even announce itself as loss until much later. There’s pain there, but it’s muted, more of an ache than a wound.
In the films, the students’ gaze mirrors this emotional terrain. Their presence feels intimate, unguarded, almost placing the viewer in the position of a passerby glimpsing the interior lives of strangers through the open windows of their homes. In doing so, the work folds personal memory back onto itself, echoing the same quiet wounds Culver describes.
Watching the 16-minute video in full becomes essential. Its cumulative effect is disarming: a meditation on relationships that once carried weight yet dissolved into absence, lingering in ways that resist closure. It also captures something more immediate, the intensity of shared experience, of discovering the world through another lens, here quite literally through that of the camera.
I have to confess I shed a quiet, shy tear while watching the videos (please do yourself a favour and watch it in full). It crystallised like a memory trip, reflecting on relationships that once mattered to me deeply, those I left behind yet somehow still remain, perhaps forever? alongside the candidness and passion of being a student.
Salvadori herself shares that as she watched her students’ edits, she felt a deep gratitude for having met each of them and for how strong their bond had become over the months. And also to Culver for allowing this moment to exist, for being so open to her ideas… the muted pain of leaving friends behind, so present in Some Stories Linger, somehow existing in parallel with the potential of a new beginning.
The video conveys the same sense as the song, looking back on moments in life that felt mundane, painful, or confusing at the time. Only later do they reveal their meaning or their beauty. A real document of a moment in time, something fleeting yet lasting.
A lifetime that is too long to wait, and too short not to be lived fully.
