Sound Check Live: Jem Cohen & Terry Riley

This collaboration was originally commissioned for the Cinema Texas 2004 festival. The European première will be an enhanced version, with both new music and filmic variations. Last summer, Jem Cohen filmed New York. The mood is melancholy, with unspectacular sights in sombre black & white tonality. At times it even seems like the city has become a ghost town. His stream of images is quite the opposite of a city symphony, a genre that thrived when modernism peaked in the 1920s. How to continue to celebrate eternal progress, dogmatic rationalism and often oppressive architecture when towers come tumbling down and so many anonymous lives are being crushed by the most expensive war machine of all ages? The final reel shows glimpses of America’s biggest anti-war march ever. What place is left for any individual voice or vote? The sober piano music by Terry Riley takes us back to the modest beginnings when instruments started to accompany film. Yet he quickly transports us to a whole different realm, unfolding an angular melodic line of gradually intensifying, steadily more complex sonorities. When the music stops for a while, a voice recites names of dead soldiers, both American and Iraqi. Then Terry Riley sings. Blessings, Omens, Spells and Mojos is a serene, but insistent expression of protest and a meditation on the value of life in the 21st century. (EC)