Dissolve (2020)

fl, cl, pf, vln, vla, vlc, tape, video
21 minutes

Co-commissioned by Explore Ensemble, HCMF and November Music.

The long dissolve, is an old and rather unfashionable kind of film edit. It involves the slow(ish) transition between two things: two shots, or a shot and blackness. “Dissolve” makes use of multiple transitions both visual and sonic, on different time scales. The film material is a series of long-exposure photographs taken while walking down the streets of Berlin cross-dissolved together to create a dream-like, alienating version of an ordinary activity. The sound has at its basis field recordings made while walking along these same streets. These sounds also transition, most often between a concrete (real-world) and abstract (musicalized) state. The ensemble acts in various ways, sometimes distilling a solid musical line from the material in the electronic part, at other times providing a counterpoint to it.