This music video for my track, Stint, was a collaboration with sculptor and photographer Harrison Higgs.
From the album Skew/Flume.
Category: sound
My sound design and camerawork 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.
Locate was commissioned by Disjecta Contemporary Art Center for the PORTLAND2014 Biennial of Contemporary Art, curated by Amanda Hunt.
12-minute loop, stereo sound
Portland2014 Biennial of Contemporary Art
Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Portland, OR
March 8 – April 27, 2014
Concept & Choreography: Kelly Rauer
Dancers: Kelly Rauer and Leah Wilmouth
Camera and sound: Seth Nehil
Review by Sarah Sentilles at Oregon Arts Watch
My sound design and camerawork for this installation captured dancer and video artist Kelly Rauer leaping, jumping and crawling through the empty space of a blank, sunlit studio. Rauer arranged video projections throughout the gallery along with 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 sounds on television monitors. The gallery space was filled with creaky footsteps, bodily thuds and breathing.
8 video screens with multichannel sound
Jan. 13 – Feb. 15, 2013
The Art Gym at Marylhurst University, Portland, OR
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.
For the score, I selected several pages from Cage’s early composition Six Melodies for Violin and Keyboard (1950), dedicated to the artists and designers Josef and Anni Albers. Chance procedures determined time blocks, repetitions and fragments of the score. Musicians were tasked with reconfiguring pitch material to fit the repetitions through the manipulation of note values and rests. A series of 1-minute field recordings, contributed by students and others, were played in a sequence and at volume levels determined by chance procedures. On an upper level, poet Lisa Radon recited a “writing through” of a Cage text throughout. Audiences were free to move, viewing the performance from different perspectives or following dancers as they moved to different quadrants throughout the space.
A few challenges: first, how to make an event that is “Cageian” without being Cage. We wanted to honor the spirit of Cage without simply creating a “cheap imitation”. While allowing for some personal twists on Cage’s methods, we used indeterminate and chance-derived procedures throughout (thanks http://www.random.com!). Another challenge is also the real benefit of Cage’s primary idea – his dictum to erase the ego, to follow the “operation of nature” and to be interested in what results. It’s both difficult and rewarding to remove one’s desire from the determination of outcomes, to give up any idea of “the way it should be” and to let the score take over. As Cage might say, what we don’t know is more interesting than what we do know (or think we know). – from the program notes by Seth Nehil & Linda Austin
Musicians: Matt Carlson (synthesizer), Patrik Csak (glockenspiel), Jeff Diteman (cello), Jordan Dykstra (viola), Richie Greene (violin), Ben Kates (saxophone), Catherine Lee (oboe), Thomas Thorson (synthesizer) & Reed Wallsmith (saxophone).
Dancers: Mike Barber, Jin Camou, Anne Furfey, Sally Garrido-Spencer, Keyon Gaskin, Carla Mann, Paige McKinney, Kaj-anne Pepper, Chelsea Petrakis, Kelly Rauer, Danielle Ross, Noelle Stiles, Emily Stone, Robert Tyree, Taka Yamamoto and Lucy Yim.
Spoken Text: Lisa Radon
Pacific Northwest College of Art
Portland, OR, Oct. 3, 2012
My sound score for this dance performance was developed through an extended series of improvisations with the company, in rehearsal and various in-progress showings. 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 hissing and musical textures. Additional sounds emerged from multiple on-stage televisions displaying video documents of the choreographic process.
March 23 – 25, 2012, Imago Theater, Portland OR
Children’s Games was an evening-length performance combining cinematic images with sung and spoken voice, abstract sound, and performative actions. The piece drew inspiration from the 1560 Breughel painting of the same name, and the 1970 Truffaut film, The Wild Child.
Children’s Games celebrated the associative, fragmentary and irrational aspects of play and explored the traumatic colonizations of wild space. Onstage, a chorus dressed in the medieval garb of the Breughel painting conduct vocal games and patterns.
Video projections, recorded sound and live voices mingle before giving way to an enigmatic noise band.
This dance performance, created and co-directed with Linda Austin, was based on a strategic “forgetting” of Seijun Suzuki’s 1967 cult yakuza film, Branded to Kill. Themes, images and language emerged in our thinking through , writing through, dancing through the freewheeling surrealism of the film. Against the back wall, projected fragments of video narrative and noir imagery flashed amidst the dancers.
Choreography, including long “non-sequitur” movement sequences, interspersed with moments of dialogue, abstracted violence and shards of action. Along both sides of the stage, dancers silently mimicked and responded to movements behind semi-transparent black curtains. Mounted on the ceiling, a television monitor played a continuous hour-long action by Kaj-Anne Pepper (coming slowly unraveled in an all white “weatherbox”). An ambiguous narrative included slow-motion mock battles, chanted syllables and swung lightbulbs.
Much of my original score can be heard on the album Knives.
Co-written and directed by Linda Austin & Seth Nehil
Choreography: Linda Austin
Sound and video: Seth Nehil
Dancers: Anne Furfey, Kaj-Anne Pepper, Linda Austin, Lucy Yim, Bonnie Green, Rebecca Harrison.
Performance Works NW, Portland OR, November, 2009
This outdoor dance performance was the culmination of Linda K Johnson’s year-long artist residency amid the construction of the South Waterfront. Promenade responded to a rectangular park – a blank plot of grass surrounded by cranes and just-finished high-rise buildings. A PA system was mounted on the balcony of a nearby condo, where I mixed ambient tones at a volume just loud enough to integrate with the urban environment. Six performer-participants rode bicycles with portable amps attached. Circling the park, they played long drones to create a swirling doppler effect. The bicyclists then moved among the audience, playing clusters, streams and bursts of loosely synchronized sound. At various locations, dancers dressed entirely in white performed short interactions, illuminated by a crew holding battery-powered lights on long poles.
South Waterfront, Portland OR
July 2009
This performance combined 6-channel recorded sound with 12 live vocalists and 4 video projections. The performers flashed colored lights and moved through the large warehouse in simple geometrical configurations. Interacting with spatialized recorded textures, they produced clusters of sound with voices and sound-making objects. Encircling, traveling and moving among the audience, the performers used percussive whacking of boards strapped to feet, rustling of large laurel branches and the tonal friction of small bells dragged across the floor. Patterns were informed by research into the emergent properties seen in schools of fish or swarms of swallows. On the four projections, colorful flashes of images: painted faces screaming, dancing figures, recombining words.
The space between events is charged. We utilize an erotics of distance: a call connects across space and invigorates a shared medium – our atmosphere. In balance, we utilize an erotics of proximity: the “tuning-in” of closeness, the ways of changing and being changed by those who are near.
Distance and proximity interact as a self-organizing form. I am interested in schools of fish, flocks of swallows, swarms of ants. Spatial distance may be confused and con-fused as a map of temporal distance for making music. Our sounds stay near, keeping an always-same but always-changing form, self-maintaining but allowing for rupture at any moment. This is a proximation of form.
Our ears move in the spaces between events. – {from the program notes}
Video Performers: Linda Austin, Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner (Rikki Rothenberg,
Live performers: Elie Charpentier, Eve Connell,Theodore Holdt, Emma Lipp, Sara Mapelli, Mindy McGovern,Peter Musselman,Sandra Preston, Kelly Rauer, Morgan Ritter, Kersti Werdell.
Costume & Makeup: Diana Lang
Movement consultant: Linda K. Johnson
AudioCinema, Portland OR
November 2008
My original score for this dance piece featured 4-channel sound, spread throughout a reclaimed warehouse. Audiences were seated in one of three performance areas while simultaneous dances could be glimpsed through gaps. Three times, audiences switched areas and the repeating dance was witnessed from a new perspective and with new music.
Portland, OR, Oct. – Nov. 2007
Linda Austin and I reconfigured the solo from this performance as a video and sound installation called Circus Me (A Round).
Seth Nehil 