Toxic City Music: Evan Caminiti & Paul Clipson

Thursday, July 6th, ISSUE presents New York artist Evan Caminiti and San-Francisco-based filmmaker Paul Clipson in an audiovisual collaboration drawing from Caminiti’s most recent album Toxic City Music (Dust Editions 2017) as well as Clipson’s recent 16mm impressions of the “charged metabolism” of city life.

Inspired by the “psychic and physical toxicity of life in late capitalism,” Evan Caminiti’s Toxic City Music utilizes sounds sourced from daily life in NYC. These found sounds are heavily processed and woven into instrumentation ranging from electronically treated guitar to modular synthesizers. Toxic City Music evolved over the course of several years, resulting in a wealth of material which will be re-processed and uniquely presented in an improvisatory manner in live performance. The Wire describes the new work as "The sound of things falling apart with unbearable slowness…[with Caminiti] reporting his observations with acuity, integrity, and artfulness."

Alongside Caminiti’s soundwork, filmmaker Paul Clipson presents a collage of recent color and black & white celluloid impressions, gestural sketches, filmed around the world, in which the surfaces, textures, spaces, and dimensions of the modern metropolis are studied with a 16mm film camera. Clipson’s film looks to convey the charged metabolism of the city space, whether it be San Francisco, London, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Athens, Sydney, or New York, among others. The film projects the streets, sidewalks, skyscrapers, and architecture of these urban environments, revealing subliminal patterns of experience.

NYC based artist Evan Caminiti (b.1987) has explored electro-acoustic music since the mid 2000’s. With a focus on the intersection of composition and improvisation, he blends electronics, field recordings, and electric guitar, warping the sound sources using tape and digital processing. He has performed extensively throughout North America and Europe and collaborated with musicians such as Jon Porras (as Barn Owl), Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Ellen Fullman, Stephen O’Malley, Jacob Felix Heule, and visual artists Paul Clipson, Sabrina Ratté, and Wilhelm Sasnal. His work has been published on his imprint Dust Editions, in addition to Thrill Jockey Records, Shelter Press, Root Strata, Important Records, and more. He will be a guest composer at EMS Stockholm in September 2017

Paul Clipson is a San Francisco-based filmmaker who often collaborates with sound artists and musicians on films, live performances, and installations. His Super 8 and 16mm films aim to bring to light visual preoccupations that reveal themselves while working in a stream of consciousness manner, combining densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments, in a process that encourages unplanned-for results, responding to and conversing with the temporal qualities of musical composition and live performance. His work has screened around the world in festivals and at sound and film events such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Film Festival, and the Cinémathèque Française.