Echodes is a cinépoeme concert with noise guitar, minimal composer, Rhys Chatham and experimental video artist, Angie Eng. This collaboration began with common interests such as noise music, experimental video, and the theme of mysticism. Taking inspiration from the trumpet and guitar of Chatham, Eng creates a series of videos based upon rituals, magic, and the illusionary divine.

Chatham’s trumpet sound is an amalgamation between Don Cherry’s free way of playing combined with Jon Hassell’s modal and rhythmic approach, all adding up to a sound that’s as fresh as early morning baked bread in Paris. Expect downtempo, flexistential insanity, side by side with hard-driving stoner rhythms, and the sweet sound of screaming black metal riffs morphed into hydrogen jukebox delay trumpet.

Bacchus in Vegas is about aesthetics and perception. It was inspired by Leonardo DaVinci’s painting, Bacchus in a Landscape. Deemed too sensual to be St. John the Baptist by its owner Cassiano dal Pozzo, he had it repainted as Bacchus, the pagan god of wine and lust. The irony in this painting is depicted by live drawings of Bacchus paralleled with photographs of Las Vegas and archival footage of buildings being destroyed. She chose Las Vegas, as a symbol for both paradise and hell, as an analogy of the story with Leonardo’s painting.

In Matador’s Spin and Owls Know, she works with a mini-camera, props (a feather and tarot cards), and the software, VDMX. These objects are transformed into windows for QuickTime loops. Owls Know takes its inspiration from this symbol of wisdom and is mixed between parts of the owl and the Hebrew alphabet in reference to Kabbalah magic.

Matador’s Spin is based upon bullfighting as a quasi-religious ritual. The matador’s cape spinning “magically” turns into an illusion when the bull’s charge is meaningless. The set of passes evokes a dilemma for the bull — is the experience: Real, Illusion, Real-and-Illusion, Neither-Real-nor-Illusion. A scientist and a radio broadcaster look down upon the bullfight as if higher deities observing human acts.

In the piece, Holy Groves fields of astrolabes are animated and juxtaposed with mirrored images of people figures at the palace of Versailles.  Astrolabes used for divinity purposes as well as astronomy is contrasted with tourists that seem like ants gazing upon the gardens of the ‘Sun King’, Louis IV.

Read Echodes review on Artist Organized Art by Jessica Higgins

Echodes 2010-present
cinépoeme concert
duo with Angie Eng (video) and Rhys Chatham (composer, trumpet, guitar)
TRT- 60 minutes