Concert for camera

Thanks to the generosity of the Lewis & Clark Theater Department, I was able to join the musical duo of Luke Wyland and John Niekrasz in the Fir Acres Theater for most of a Sunday afternoon. This black box space was perfect for highlighting the musicians and their instruments, the drum kit and various percussion items, a large keyboard packed with MIDI devices and control surfaces.

Bright neutral lights were set up on stands around the band, dropping the black walls and floor into shadow. Luke recorded audio directly into Ableton Live, setting up 8 mics on the drums and capturing his performance on various synths and samplers for later mixing. I set up three cameras, two of them on tripods, and then floated around the players with a third gimbal-mounted camera.

We captured multiple performances of 7 different songs, all part of a suite titled Covert/Overt. These pieces use sampled and recontextualized voices of the stuttering community, the rhythms and melodies of the recorded voices seeding compositional and improvisational responses. The music is propulsive and energetic, which helped to propel me with the camera in swooping paths. Although we had to work quickly and efficiently, it was a blast to improvise with the music.

I’ll be using this footage for a future episode of Dream Logics, with a full portrait of the duo and the Covert/Overt project.