Garet’s Video Settings of Waller’s Music

screen shot from video of “UNTITLED #2 (frame composition)”

Today is the day that dublab, the online experimental music radio station, streamed two video productions created by Richard Garet as accompaniment for the music of Michael Vincent Waller. Fortunately, both of Garet’s videos have been uploaded to streaming hosts. The earlier of these, “UNTITLED (frame composition),” about ten minutes in duration and created in 2017, was uploaded to YouTube in October of that year. The other, “UNTITLED #2 (frame composition),” was completed earlier this year and uploaded to Vimeo shortly thereafter. The duration is slightly less than nine minutes.

The 2017 video has a soundtrack consisting of Waller’s “Lines,” a single uninterrupted movement on his Trajectories album. The music was scored for piano (R. Andrew Lee) and cello (Seth Parker Woods). All of the imagery involves water with particular attention to the surfaces of bodies of water. It begins with the calm one encounters at a docking site but then moves out to where high waves form. Garet deploys a variety of transforms, primarily to shift the color content. This takes “purely natural” images and endows them with supernatural interpretations. Throughout the transformations between the ordinary and the extraordinary, Waller’s duo unfolds with its own sense of an inner calm.

That sense of quietude can also be found in the music for the 2020 video. This one presents two tracks from Waller’s most recent album, Moments, “Stolen Moments,” composed in 2018, followed by “Bounding,” composed in 2017. These are both solo piano works played, again, by Lee. In both cases Waller seems to be “capturing the moment” with a sense of inner calm. Garet’s video contrasts almost violently with an overall structure of embedded rectangles that throbs intensely as the colors of the different sized rectangles change at a pace that might almost be mistaken for the oscillations of the alpha waves of the brain.

The result is that each of these videos is best appreciated for the contrasts that cut across them. On the auditory side, however, the compositions from Moments are best distinguished by the absence of the cello. There is a lyricism to Woods’ performance of “Lines” that gives the cello an almost vocal quality, suggesting a connection between man and nature in Garet’s video, even if that connection is little more than how the different bodies of water might be viewed by an individual on the surface of that water. In contrast the images for the two selections from Moments almost defy intense viewing, as if too much attentiveness might disrupt the basic workings of visual perception.

Each of these videos has enough imaginative content to hold up to multiple viewings; but, given the intensity of the 2020 production, I am not sure I would recommend consecutive examination.