The New Jersey Film Festival has started a new concert series with a moving image component as part of their programming with the hope of reawakening the mostly dormant New Brunswick Music Scene. Last September 15th guitar virtuoso Tim Motzer performed to an experimental film. That was the first true audio-visual concert they put on. Acclaimed singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler also did an amazing concert with her own movie projections on June 15. Noise-Ambient musician Jim Haynes will be coming from California to do a show on October 18. This performance will include accompanying projections of experimental films by Marjorie Conrad, Anita Labelle and Albert Gabriel Nigrin. Festival Director Al Nigrin said: “We are inviting musicians whose work I really admire and whose work I think is also very cinematic.”
Here is an interview with Jim Haynes that I conducted via email:
How did your upcoming concert at the New Jersey Film Festival come about?
I was invited by Albert Nigrin, to participate in a screening in which I would perform to several pieces of film selected by him. My contributions will involve abstracted, industrial noise generated in situ from small varispeed motors, coiled wire pick ups, synths, and shortwave, with some loosely sequenced electronics and manipulated tape playback. One particular segment of the performance is a direct homage to Alice Kemp, a British noise artist who works under the Schimpfluch-Gruppe banner of rather difficult aktionist performance artists. I had the great pleasure and honor of sharing a bill with her in London earlier this year. Her piece was frighteningly good, something of a private seance made public, complete with numerous sprititualist knockings and violent outbursts as she quietly stood and administered her intense stare upon the audience before answering a telephone - a call to which no one else was privy to. It was very powerful, and my homage runs adjacent to her nocturnal bumps in the night, with a repurposed recording onto tape of the demolition of a piece of furniture that no longer served any purpose.
Still from Albert Gabriel Nigrin and Anita LaBelle's Ascension from the Disco Inferno.
The concert is being billed as an AV concert? What does this mean?
It may be exactly correct to qualify this as an exquisite corpse in the true sense, but there is an overlay of my sound presentation with visuals projected behind me that includes Ascension from the Disco Inferno by Albert Nigrin and Anita LaBelle and a special edit of Desire Path by M. Conrad. Given that these pieces had specific sound design in mind, independent of my presentation, the simultaneous sound and image projections will undoubtably create moments of considerable dissonance but also potential for interesting, if likely fleeting sites of synchronicity.
Still from Marjorie Conrad's Desire Path.
I have been listening to your music for almost 3 years and I love it! When describing your music you say you "like to rust things." What do you mean by this?
Decay and corrosion have been central to my work for three decades by now. It started in the early '90s with experimentations with chemically treating silver photographs to get the silver to decay and tarnish. But I also figured out how to embed the residues of rusted steel and burnished copper into the gel of photograph, enabling a rich set of colors to work with the black and white prints. It was in this context that I was given a challenge to answer the question: what is the sound of rust? In trying to solve this, I asked my friend Loren Chasse - himself a notable sound artist, with a rich catalogue of textured drone, hushed noise, and diffused psychedelia - and we tried to solve it together. The results were mixed, but the process proved interesting enough that we continued collaborating as Coelacanth in the early '00s. There were ideas that I wanted to explore outside of this, and I started recording on my own. The tools that I have used involve electronics pushed towards immolation, textured abstraction that may reflect the metaphors of disintegration, and the psychological eerienesss of empty channels picked up on shortwave radio.
What do you want listeners to take away from your upcoming concert?
I have never been one to impose any sorts of ideals or required meaning to comprehend the work or even loose feelings that may be associated with the work. I am aware that within the hierarchy of perception, the visual outweighs audio stimuli, but sound can often impact the emotional and psychological coloring of the visual in ways that truly make for an enhanced experience.
Do you have any new music in the works?
I've just finished a new album, and it has been submitted to a label. I won't say who as I do not wish to impact any decisions. This is a continuation of previous works, such as Inauspicious and Inadvertent, that build upon structured arrangements of brutalist noise and brooding drones, further shaped by moire patterns of frequencies that easy negate and obfuscate, just as easily as they can compound and aggregate. There is another piece I'm working on, based on recordings on the resonance of the Round Room, an infamous modern-day ruin located in Nevada County, California where I live. The acoustics of that space are unusual, given that it is in fact a round room; but there is also a plethora of misinformation about its origins, as for decades it has been abandoned and treated as an out-of-the-way location for teenagers to get fucked up on whatever chemical of their choosing. Spray paint had been long accompanied those festivities and a pentagram on the floor of the round room was an early addition. As such, rumors emerged that Anton LaVay, the founder of the Church Of Satan, had something to do with this site and had conducted human rituals on location. This is absolutely not true. It also not true that the round room was a municipal water tank. Just as yourself what water tank has standard issue post and lintel doors? Nope. Truth turns out to be stranger than fiction as it was the vision of a gnostic seeker in the '70s who wanted to build a retreat on that land, with a house that rotate upon an axis. He began building this utopian dream, but died just at the beginning of construction, leaving the concrete foundation as his only lasting impact, which sadly had been woefully misunderstood. All that said, the acoustics and resonance are impressive. I can report no EVPs were recorded.
The Special Musical Performance by Jim Haynes with Film Projections will take place on Friday, October 18 at 7PM in Voorhees Hall #105/Rutgers University, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ. General Admission Jim Haynes Concert Ticket=$25. To buy tickets go here.
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