Sound Check Live: Text of Light
Text of Light by the late Stan Brakhage, the 2002 Film Maker in Focus in Rotterdam, is one of the purest works of experimental cinema. The sparse but vital subject of the film is light, and nothing but light. To compose this ‘text of light’, Brakhage examined light refracted through a glass ashtray. The band Text of Light was formed in 1999 to perform improvised music during screenings of films by Stan Brakhage and other American avant-garde film makers from the 1950s and 1960s. These should not be considered soundtracks for Brakhage’s works, which are intended to be screened silently. Rather, the group uses the films as an element to stimulate improvisation, like an additional player, juxtaposing film and music in a mixed-media collage performed in real time. By changing playback speed, using effects such as processing, scratching, skipping, and looping, the turntable artist bridges the gap between the predetermination of film and the spontaneous composition of instrumentalists. The result is a new chapter in free improvisation and mixed media. It is similar to the manner in which Sonic Youth composes a lot of their music: generate some information, then modify it, and work it over further. The group Text of Light now performs in a variety of line-ups, usually as a quintet, but occasionally as a trio or a quartet. The line up in Rotterdam will be Lee Ranaldo/Alan Licht/Ulrich Krieger/Tim Barnes/DJ Olive.
In this combined programme
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The Garden of Earthly Delights
Classic meditative collage film created entirely without the use of a camera by pasting montane zone vegetation such as petals, grasses and leaves
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