Brendon Randall-Myers has a new video for “Auras,” from his upcoming LP Dynamics of Vanishing Bodies due out September 25th via New Focus Recordings. The composer/guitarist’s 37-minute piece was written specifically for the NYC-based avant-guitar quartet Dither. Thematically, the complex and challenging piece deals with the notion of ‘absence as a felt presence,’ and Randall-Myers echoes this with a varying sonic approach that uses foot pedals and looping to explore the after-effects of sound as musical presence.
Discussing the track, the composer tells us:
“In ‘Auras’, three guitarists unfurl reverb-laden cascades of harmonics while the fourth captures snippets of the reverb in a looper, assembling a ghostly echo of the live music that remains after the other players stop performing. I was thinking about how spaces retain echoes of the people that occupy them, and about technology’s ability to preserve digital remnants of our experiences after they’re over.“
The video for the track uses lighting effects and processing to create a liminal visual experience exploring the nature of optics. Light’s wave-particle duality makes it the perfect metaphor for his theme of ‘absence as felt presence.’ Randall-Myers explains:
The footage for Auras was the result of a series of light experiments conducted by director Derrick Belcham and filmmaker Tracy Maurice (studiotracymaurice.com) in her Montreal studio. They spent several days combining various lighting sources, effectors and filming techniques, putting each initial analog capture through many iterations to achieve deeper development and meaningful connection to the music. The addition of a simple mirror in portions of the final filming provided a layer of incidental metaphor and a further distance from the grounded materiality of the footage.”
While you’re at it, don’t miss Brendon Randall-Myers’ video for “Trem Chorale (single edit),” out this past August.
