Last night the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts hosted the premiere performance of Memories to Light: Never Brighter. The program was organized around a film created by Chester Canias and Antonio Remington, working with an extensive collection of Asian American home movies. The film drew upon a variety of video techniques, primarily involving different configurations of frames for clips from the source material arrayed on a single large screen.
The “soundtrack” for this movie was a “live” performance of music composed and performed by Danny Clay and Theresa Wong. Clay worked with a database of field recordings, controlling their “projection” through his laptop. Wong is both a cellist and a vocalist; and her contribution also involved electronics, electric guitar, and sheng. (The latter is a Chinese reed instrument; and, while it was listed in the program, I am not sure I saw Wong playing one.)
In the context of my own listening experiences, this performance reminded me of Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon album. That music was composed to serve as a soundtrack for a collection of seven video-paintings created by Christine Alicino. Eno’s performance was released as a 61-minute CD, perhaps the earliest release of a recording to take advantage of allowing a continuous duration beyond the limits of a single side of a long-playing vinyl.
Like Thursday Afternoon, Memories to Light was about one hour in duration; and it probably would be fair to say that the compositions and performances by Clay and Wong tended to involve a rhetoric of ambience. To the extent that the Memories to Light film amounted to an “exhibit in video form,” that rhetoric of ambience provided a good “fit” between the visual and the auditory. Nevertheless, I doubt that there will be little argument that the visual experience overstayed its welcome, perhaps because its creators were determined to account of every frame of source material they had accumulated.
As a result, given my own interest in the music, I found that I was spending more time watching Wong working with her many resources (my seat location provided an excellent view) than dwelling on the film content. Indeed, the novelty of many of her sonorities drew my attention from the screen, watching her in action to try to determine how she was creating those sonorities. One might say that the background frequently found its way to occupying the foreground to compensate for the paucity of “information” coming through the projected film.
Indeed, paucity of information was a problem even before the performance began. A rambling introduction by two members of the McEvoy staff served as an annoying introduction to remarks by one of the film’s creators. The latter (Canias, as I recall) read from written remarks (presumably his own), which were decidedly helpful in preparing those of us in the audience for what would follow. Nevertheless, even with that preparation, it was hard to avoid feeling that the film undermined itself by overplaying its hand.
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