January 15, 2021
Here’s my most recent film commission that premiered on Infrequent Seams’ STREAMFEST 2020 in December – this film suite of mine is now streaming for watching or other enigmatic purposes. I created it on-site in the Catskills and it’s a commentary on the Yiddish Labor Unionizers, and also my own family history of ancestors murdered by Stalin, worked to death in the Gulag Death Camps, and later New York-bound refugees who escaped persecution for their activism against fascist and autocratic regimes.
I’m working with a combination of salvaged black and white 16mm film cameras, plus some now rare-as-hell Japanese digital video cameras that were created with internal lens features that shatter light into a granular in-camera datastream – a limited edition gadget I was fortunate to scrounge during its kickstarter. The final films are black and white and engage with both the landscape, the history of the refugee and labor union projects by Yiddish-speaking Jewish activists, and with the juxtaposition of rights for which they were fighting in the 19th century that continue to be prescient and necessary today. It was edited by Eric Grush, with performances by myself and by Jen Kutler.
Infrequent Seams has released my six-section, site-specific video and film installation commissioned for composer and musician Ty Citerman‘s highly acclaimed new album surrounding the Yiddish Labor Rights Movement in New York – Bop Kabbalah+Voices: When You Speak of Times to Come (Ven Du Redst Fun Naye Tsaytn). This video premiered in December 2020 on the global live-streaming music festival STREAMFEST. Infrequent Seams Streamfest 2020 presented multimedia work from more than 40 artists over four days, and most of that work is represented in the four digital releases, in 24bit/48khz audio, as well as video.
STREAMFEST was acclaimed by The Wire, and co-sponsored by Led by composer, presenter, curator, and bassist James Ilgenfritz, the New Yorker- and The Wire-celebrated company Infrequent Seams presents new work by emerging composers and performers in New York City and elsewhere. Infrequent Seams seeks to locate a post-downtown musical practice in and out of New York City (even in the downtown area). Conceptually it supports music that treats the AACM, Sonic Arts Union, No Wave, the New York School, and the SF Tape Center as antecedents to one emerging post-millennial genre.