December 1, 2020
The inimitable Infrequent Seams has commissioned me to create a six-part series of live-streaming original site-specific films at the locations of Labor Union organizing sites in the Catskills 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). 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.
I’ve begun the initial filming for this project, and am delighted to show a few still images from the dailies! I’m working with a combination of salvaged black and white 16mm film cameras, plus some now rare-as-hell Japanese 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 will be 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.
