NYC Musicians, 2014
video portraits at high speed, 2014
I am lucky to have performed with the best experimental musicians in New York City. In the summer of 2014, I called up Aaron Henderson, my favorite high-speed cinematographer, and decided to start what I hope to be a larger series documenting the card-carrying members of the New York avant-garde whom I have known, admired, and worked with over the years. The inaugural 2014 edition consists of portraits of seven of my favorite NYC Musicians, all of them friends, most of them long-term collaborators. As with Vertical Music, the intent here is to illustrate the nuances and gestures (auditory and visual) that go unnoticed at normal speed. For their portrait, each musician was told to improvise for three takes of six minutes each. Composited together, each piece is an intimate, three-hour portrait of a musician, giving us a perspective on the inner world of each sitter.
