I consider this my first solo release which feels strange, in a way. I've always considered music a communal endeavor but there was no opportunity to include other performers within the time constraints of this performance; especially since none of this music is improvised. The music is also very particular, meaning that it serves a purpose. Not as a background soundtrack to a film but rather as an equal partner to experimental imagery. Sound and vision, hand in hand. It happened one night in downtown New York to a packed house at the Maya Deren Theater at the Anthology Film Archives. It won't happen again.

This is a live sound recording from the Anthology Films Archive’s mixer during the performance of Bradley Eros’ composition for Projection Booth, Projectors & Projectionists. Bradley commissioned me to compose a sound score for his “light-projection” compostion. His few directives were to incorporate the sound of the projection booth into the score itself; the sound of the projectors themselves, tape splicers, canned air, drawers opening and closing, cabinets, lens changes, etc... In other words, the sounds that the audience never hears but the projectionist does. I want to thank Benji Santos with supplying me with a number of those sounds. I also included data sounds and sounds that originated as jpg files converted by software into sound files, then further manipulated. The bulk of the score is machine and data sounds, although heavily mangled. The other directives Bradley gave were for Colour Theory to be ethereal; for Maya 1st Movement to be round and white; for Maya 2nd Movement to be black, menacing, edgy; and for all hell to break loose in Maya 3rd Movement. I hope my score fulfilled those expectations. This is my first solo record. Although in some releases I may write all the music, I gravitate to the idea of a band. This is the first time I was completely alone in its making. Lastly, this is only an aural component of a performance that incororated light and sound. The performance can never be repicated and only those that attended can verify how amazing that night was.

About the performance itself:
IMAGELESS FILMS: MAYA
This screening is part of: IMAGELESS FILMS, PART 5
MAYA. or, Composition for Projection Booth, Projectors & Projectionists in the Maya Deren Theater (and booth) @ Anthology Film Archives

2016/22, ca. 40 min, projector performance for 8mm,16mm, 35mm & slide + sound

“A site-specific cinema performance employing the myriad parameters of the technical apparatuses of analog film projection and light, using Anthology’s Maya Deren Theater projection booth & projectors and operated by our skilled projectionists. The work will include all of the variations of lenses, aperture plates, bulbs, lamps, gates, screen masking, shutter speeds, frame rates, change-over, focusing & framing, etc., in a composition for illuminated flicker and filmless geometries of light, for all types of projectors: 8mm, Super-8mm, 16mm, 35mm, and slide, from an instructional score for the performers. It is a work of contracted cinema, or cinéma concret, focused on the cinematographic machine and filmic light: an exercise in analog fetish, pushed towards the revelation of the invisible mechanisms, foregrounding & celebrating that which is usually hidden from sight.” –Bradley Eros