Join us for an immersive multimedia performance featuring one-of-a-kind projection-based light art accompanied by a pop-orchestral ensemble.
Photo: H.N. James
Members of the Ensemble
About the Performance
Curtis Godino has written a score to cinematic dust. He invites you to listen and see where the ashes will settle. The actual film reels, destroyed in a fire in Italy long before Mr. Godino’s birth, have occasioned a soundtrack without a moving image. An echo without a bang. Drawing on the vocabulary of film composers Ennio Moriconne and Wendy Carlos, tithing to the church of field recordists Pierre Henry and John Cage, channeling the spacious groupthink of the Wrecking Crew, Mr. Godino, a Florida-born organist, auteur bandleader, and light artist of New York repute, presents an instrumental musical event that demands interpretation as a story. A narrative that is consuming and often haunting, yet amorphous. A story without words. A picture—unless you are lucky enough to attend his live ensemble, where intermittent abstractions are projected and manipulated from a slide carousel onto the players of his stage—without the slightest visual reference.
The plot of this story is up to you, listener. You are invited to your own canvas, with a palette of Mr. Godino’s tonal moods at your disposal—among them delight, menace, nostalgia, and relief—and with the gentle guidance of his interlocking overtures, movements, interludes, and leitmotifs.
“Radical nothingness,” if you ask the composer, is how it all hangs together. By this Mr. Godino means the kind of auditory mediation required of his audience, whereby the here-and-now of our daily lives must be put on pause, the forever chemicals of our scrollings and swipings temporarily purged, to enable a transformative musical consequence: the jellying of tangential, ever-mingling wisps of experience—memories, we might call them—into a coherent whole. The music you are about to hear, like Brion Gysin’s dream machine of yore, is an appliance designed to help you attain that rare attitude. “In a world that is at war for your attention,” Mr. Godino explains, “the most radical thing you can do is nothing.”
Once upon a time, the old word for this nothing was imagination. In our new era of endless, wireless information, however, Mr. Godino believes we have evolved to require a new, more encompassing faculty: the temporary departure from one’s body; the separation or disconnection from a corporate entity; in a word, discorporation.
