Both the name of the track and the ensemble sound like the ad agency’s private label, and this isn’t really a post about the music, anyway. Even so, the composition is elegant, reverberant, and fitting. Two unbound hands reaching out toward both ends of a piano, if for no other reason than that they can.
The clip is Amnesty International’s “Slide To Unlock” advertisement: one of at least three device-centric spots, and easily our favorite. Wallpaper on a locked iPhone depicts a man’s shackled, unwashed hands. A user’s finger operates the slide bar and unlocks the phone, revealing a second wallpaper, in which the shackles are cast aside, and the hands are freed. A title card offers a link.
The gesture may seem downright futile, even hollow: the 2.3 inch swipe of an index finger across a wireless device — more than likely intending to unlock the phone for another crack at Angry Birds — could not be further removed from Amnesty’s efforts to free a political prisoner, or police a brutal regime’s human rights abuses. But awareness begins this way, in tiny increments, agonizingly small degrees.
Visit the app store on your phone and download the free Amnesty app. There seems no easier way to get started.



