Music and Images

Live audio-visual performance

"What I am doing with my music is to produce something without rhythm or melody, by using many microtones that cause movements very, very slowly."

Niblock’s film work includes The Magic Sun (1960), a black and white abstract tribute to the legendary jazz musician Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra, and a series of documentary works made in the rural areas of Mexico, Peru, China, Brazil, Portugal, Lesotho, Puerto Rico and Hungary, united as The Movement of People Working (1973-1985). The rhythmic structure of slow scenes of human labour and consideration of rich movement textures within particular frames grows into a sheer analysis of the manual labour dynamics, focusing on the frequent unjust treatment of human labour, almost abstractly represented here. Static surface textures and extremely active harmonic movement, characteristic of his music, thus correspond with the treatment of visual material. A slow rhythm of audiovisual performance accompanies the intertwining between drones and moving images depicting human movement while working or computer-generated abstract black and white images. Music and images floating through time remind to be temporal movements themselves.

Organized by Multimedia Institute’s Explicit Music concert-series in collaboration with 25 FPS.