Alex Waterman premieres a set of new solo works for amplified cello, radios, found sounds, and assorted strings. A rare outing for this renowned performer, the event marks his first solo performance in two years. The evening opens with Cameron Keith Gainer's Luna del Mar, a short film featuring a soundtrack composed and performed by Waterman.
Alex Waterman's music over the last 6 years has been in dialogue with a wide array of technologies of capture and transmission: field recordings, early recording technologies, radio, Foley design, radio plays, film soundtracks, and sound installations that interact with or create new architectures for the viewer/listener to walk through. His last soundtrack for Tiger's Mind by Beatrice Gibson, played with the idea of diagetic and non-diagetic sound, asking the actors to create the soundtrack live on set or for the recordist to play the soundtrack on location and re-record it for the final soundtrack. False and/or imaginary resonance is a theme throughout much of Waterman's work. In a work from 2008-9, A Ballad of Accounting, Waterman records the acoustic cello underneath the Brooklyn Queens Expressway in 12 locations over 3 days. An elegy to circulation-- it pits the cello in an epic struggle with the highway as the cello attempts to silence the leviathan.
Like Jonathan Edwards the puritan minister, Waterman's work searches for a(n) (imaginary) room for one's thoughts. A place where what is outside of one's present/reality can be projected, transmitted, and experienced. Waterman attempts to resound what cannot be heard by our unaided sensory organs and to reveal other worlds inside or outside of the ones that we are moving through.
Notes on the film:
Luna del Mar, Cameron Keith Gainer’s filmic representation of organisms in the deep sea, reflects the artist’s child-like fascination with the living world in a way that engages a not-so-child-like formal investigation. Originally shot in 16mm format and transferred to DVD, Luna del Mar was sparked by an initial interest in Pyrodinium bahamense, a bioluminescent organism specific to the region of the coast of Puerto Mosquito, Vieques, Puerto Rico, Gainer’s research led him on a journey that culminated in a captivating 16mm film that is, in his words, “a filmic representation of deep space created by choreographing millions of single-cell organisms through the movement of an Olympic synchronized swimmer named Luna del Mar.” His work approaches nature on a formal level, and coupled with desire to know more, the work exhibits the compulsion to flex between the “big idea” and one’s personal experience; it explores the boundaries between what we know and what we know of.