I worked with Mr. Bowie around his ’97 tour doing the video stage sets and rock videos; it was a very collaborative and experimental moment for me."
good interview - students could read this:
TONY: That’s funny because Kim called me up right before Sonic Youth did this set of tours three or four months ago and said, “Would you be interested in doing projections for the show?” And I was like, “Yeah, that would be great. How long?” She said two hours, and I asked by when she’d need it, and she was like, “The end of the week.” (laughter) I happen to have this ongoing series that I call my ambient series, that I will show sometime somewhere when I find the right moment, where I just set up cameras, kind of like what you did, where I feel like something good is happening, and I just let it go. Sometimes there’s camera movement, but usually not. It might be a water theme park, and I just find a frame where there are people in fluorescent inner tubes going off a slide, and shoot that for 20 minutes. I’ve been doing this since the late ’80s, since Hi-8 introduced two-hour tapes. So I took a lot of these things and cut them together with Josh Thorson, my editor, and gave them to Sonic Youth for their tour. When I went to see their show at NorthSix in Brooklyn I was totally moved by the experience, it blew me away. They turned off the lights, and the stuff that was happening was just totally insane. It was projected right over the band, with a white wall behind it—birds were flying across the stage, images like liquid appeared on people’s faces. And I couldn’t believe the complexity of the relationship between these randomly put together clips and the music. We had no idea what their playlist was; it probably would have ruined it had we known because as soon as you start to illustrate any kind of music, it’s horrible.
AL Yeah, I had the same realization at one of the early Text of Light gigs in Philadelphia. We had done our show a couple of times before, and up until then I had thought of them as regular improv gigs, where a bunch of name players come together and see what happens. I looked up at some point to see what was going on up on the screen, and the drummer, William Hooker, who was right in front of the screen and couldn’t see it, was doing something with his hand on the drum that corresponded exactly with what was happening on the screen.
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