Collaborations can emerge from the strangest of places. A fellow guitarist who initially I knew only through guitar forums turns out to be a bonafide composer of contemporary ‘sounds’ – studied composition at Dartington where his tutorials were extraordinary: “the uncomfortable silence when I played my latest DADGAD musings on my guitar to my composition lecturer who specialised in concertos for wardrobes and carbon-fibre fishing rods… “lounge music” was all he said after about 5 minutes of waiting…”
Just by chance Michael mentioned that he has been working on a conceptual piece. For a guitarist quite well-known on the international ‘folk’ circuit (albeit, ‘new folk’, i.e. contemporary, cutting edge, but within the confines of the heritage of a six string instrument) I was quite surprised at this. At first I thought it was a joke… then as we exchanged emails it became clear that he has another existence as a creator of ‘little sounds’ as I call them.
He offered to make some music for my videos – I don’t have anything on the go at the moment as I’m painting, but mentioned one video, in fact my first, that I recently resurrected and uploaded to Vimeo just last month.
‘Dot to Dash’ is a simple video of the moon, shot in negative with a slow shutter speed; it takes on a life of its own – insect-like, crawling over the surface of the picture plane (video frame?). The addition of atmospheric audio creates a completely new dimension.
I’m really grateful to Michael and now we’re eager to develop the idea… just got to wait for a full moon – well that’s tomorrow, better charge the camera!
