"HALIDES" DVD ON ROOT STRATA DOCUMENTING COLLABORATION WITH MAXWELL AUGUST CROY

Hand solarized film used to accompany live improvised music by John and Maxwell (This version has more footage and a different soundtrack than the black box version . Hand silkscreened cover art by Chris Thorson.

A document of a live set from the On Land Festival in San Francisco, September, 2009. Home Solarized Super 8 film shot by Davis in the placid green places of Northern California. The duo's lush soundtrack is bowed, scraped and plucked out on koto, electric guitar and other electronic detritus. - Root Strata Press Release.

Achingly gorgeous film/audio pairing of John Davis’ lush super 8 footage of Maxwell and John’s koto/guitar/electronic channelings, as recorded/screened at the “On Land” festival... - Mimaroglu

This new DVD from the Root Strata camp features "Hand processed & solarized" super-8 film by John Davis, set to musical accompaniment from a duo of Davis with Maxwell August Croy. This audio-visual project was projected live to improvised sounds at last year's On Land Music Festival at the Swedish American Hall, San Francisco, and is replicated here as a seventeen minute flow of abstract, analogue sound sculpting and scratchy old film. In terms of visual imagery, Davis begins by homing in on close-ups of small details from the natural world, paying particular attention to dew drops collecting on cobwebs or leaves. In its earliest stages, the music tends not to be nearly so bucolic as the imagery, beginning with a fearsome, raw blast of oscillator buzz before simmering itself down into a more composed and tranquil soundscape that yields ample low-end presence and a general demeanour of haziness. This all nicely settles into harmony with the gauzy, vintage film stock. Loaded with a striking sense of faux-nostalgia, the film is at its richest when capturing the interplay between golden, evening sunlight and long grasses, or lakeside foliage. The whole experience feels like a day-trip for the senses, a notion only reinforced by the piece's final sequence, as captured from the window of a train - at this point it's as if you're coming home. The music has a powerful presence in its own right, calling upon electric guitar and electronics - all processed into nebular, drifting shapes - but when attached to Davis' flow of light-saturated visuals the overall effect takes on a life of its own, spilling warmth from every frame. - Bookmat

A beautiful document from last year's On Land festival, the Root Strata curated gathering of artists and sound artists and musicians. This particular set featured gorgeous home solarized super-8 film shot by John Davis throughout Northern California, while Davis and Maxwell Croy, one half of the duo that runs Root Strata, created their own complimentary soundtrack, a soft hazy dronescape of bowed strings, layered vibrations and hushed, barely-there melodies. The images are really quite evocative, all washed out and softly distorted, like home movies, they have that sort of faded memory feeling, images of a lost time, and the solarizing process only further enhances that element, the slow shifting landscapes peppered with solar flares, deep red glows, the colors super saturated, flowers become miniature suns, fields of grass look like stained glass, or fields of green stars, all manner of foliage becomes more about texture and color, just softly swaying stretches of hazy burnt out shades of soft white, deep yellow, warm browns... And the music perfect suits the images, tranquil and impressionistic, long tones underpin soft shards of melody, like a muted raga, the buzz blurred and smoothed out into gauzy streaks of sound, a koto gives the music a distinctly Eastern vibe, the tones like swells on a sonic sea, meditative and mesmerizing. - Aquarius Records

"IDIOT BIGMOUTH LEADS US TO A GATHERING OF BIRDS" COLLABORATON WITH PETER STRECKFUS

A recent moving image, sound and spoken word collaboration from 2010 with poet Peter Streckfus, commissioned as part of the Rabbit Light Movies online project. The video utilizes original sound and found footage that accompanies Peter reading his poem Idiot Bigmouth Leads us to A Gathering of Birds. Peter Streckfus lives and teaches in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and his book The Cuckoo is available from Yale University Press.

"WHERE LIVES COME TO DIE"

This piece is based on a poem by Scott V. from Oakland. Scott and I have been friends and collaborators for a long time. I saw him perform this piece live and people were laughing, confused, and depressed all at once. It was amazing. After collaborating on a long-form experimental video, we decided why not keep the momentum going and turn the poem into a video.

All the video was shot in 2005 over 2 nights at the actual coffee shop near Scott’s old work (the story is based on fact). I tried to edit it in the coming days. Days turned into years as I would step away from the edit to gain perspective, but whenever I would return to it, I couldn’t come up with a good edit or sound. Luckily John Davis gave me hours worth of his audio experiments to use in a radio program I made, and I found audio from him that worked perfectly. Later after I moved to New York, Nadia Awad came to Eyebeam as an intern and pulled a rabbit out of her hat on the edit. She’s got the magic touch! More time went by and Liz Filardi added her amazing titles.

The people who worked on this are all very talented and I hope you find our little 3 minute story at least half as sad, funny, and human as I did when I first heard it. - Steve Lambert

Scott V. from Oakland text, Steve Lambert and Scott V. from Oakland visuals, Nadia Awad editing, John Davis sound, Liz Filardi titles.