sound & video
SNKR was a collaborative project with movement and video artist Kelly Rauer, resulting in videos, sounds, performances and hybrid combinations thereof.
This video backdrop for the percussion ensemble Secret Drum Band combines extreme macro footage of mushrooms, leaves and plants with extreme telephoto footage of the sun and moon.
My sound design for this theatrical reimagining of Gus VanSant’s “My Own Private Idaho” combined remixes of original music by Peter Holmstrom (Dandy Warhols) with layered environmental and atmospheric sound. Scenes in present time were joined by soft tones coming from hidden onstage speakers. As characters slipped into the past, remembered spaces emerged from a four-speaker system surrounding the audience. Microphones suspended above the stage added reverb effects to the actor’s voices at key moments.
Continue reading “Hand2Mouth Theatre – Time, a Fair Hustler”
This music video for my track, Stint, was a collaboration with sculptor and photographer Harrison Higgs.
This 4-channel video installation was created to accompany a performance by Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre NW at The White Box Gallery, University of Oregon. I shot footage on the day leading up to and including the group’s site-specific performance in a burned-out and graffitied building. The rain came and went, creating puddles that reflected the textures of concrete and spraypaint. Colors darkened into night against the architecture with dancers in yellow and silver raincoats. Within the gallery, four screens surrounded the viewers on all sides for a 10-minute screening.
My sound design for Kelly Rauer’s three-channel video installation concentrated on swooping, twirling motions. White noise, sine tones and pulsing drum machines were recorded with a swinging microphone – a pendulum to mimic the kinetics of the camera work and the dancer’s bodies. Paired and mirrored, larger than life, dancers swing the graphic marks of their limbs in the stark glare of a spotlight or fling themselves into a dark void, amid passing tones and the crackling of an ice storm.
My camerawork and sound design for this installation captured Rauer leaping, jumping and crawling through the empty space of a blank, sunlit studio. Four video projections were arranged throughout the gallery along with four televisions of various sizes. Viewers were surrounded by stuttering sequences and asynchronous rhythmic gestures, unable to see all screens at once – or any screen in isolation. From rafter-mounted speakers emerged closely-miked recordings of separate but similar movements, mixing with the small scattered synchronous sounds on television monitors. The gallery space was filled with creaky footsteps, bodily thuds and breathing.
I created a series of short trailers for Tahni Holt’s dance performance, Sun$hine, with music from the production by Thomas Thorson.
This performance, celebrating the 100th anniversary of John Cage’s birth, was curated by Mack McFarland at the Pacific NW College of Art. Dancers, musicians and a poet were stationed in all areas of the building’s large open atrium, along balconies and in far flung corners. Multiple and varied activities surrounded the mobile audience.
Continue reading “A Portland Circus on Cage’s Silence (with Linda Austin)”
My original sound score for this dance performance was developed through an extended series of improvisations with the company, in rehearsal and in-progress showings at various venues. I asked Linda to keep an audio diary, collecting the sounds of family events, passing conversations, interactions with strangers and ordinary environments – specific moments in time. These everyday sounds were mixed live for each performance, along with ambient drones, airy hisses and musical textures. Additional sounds played from multiple on-stage televisions displaying video documents of the choreographic process.
Seth Nehil 