For a complete description of Random Cinema, and the possibilities in setting up a multi-dimensional audio-visual environment, download the Liner Notes
[PDF, 85K]

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In many ways, the method by which we now compose and record music, is very much like the editing of film. Film editing takes the linear experience of real life and rearranges the sequence of events to construct a storyline, and places things in specific contexts (“reel” life). This is much different from real-time performance, where there are no second chances, and the only option is to do it right the first time. You could film a theatrical event and later go back, rearrange the sequence of events, include a soundtrack and you’d have something completely different from the actual performance. By simply adding a sound to a visual event you can change its meaning. Placing one event before another changes the viewers interpretation of the moment. And in music, making recordings gives us the illusion of things taking place in one moment, but in fact could have taken place days, weeks or even years apart.

In the mid to late 1960s, recording technology grew exponentially. When the Beatles started experimenting in the studio with the new 4-track machines and studio effects they suddenly had the ability to simulate environments and contexts in lots of creative ways. At the time this was seen as a solution to the problems associated with live performance (the primary one being the inability to be heard over screaming teenage girls, and secondarily the wealth of creative possibilities in the recording studio “vacuum”). With the expertise of composer/producer George Martin, who introduced the Beatles to the world of experimental music, they now had the option of playing with tape and effects, which had many similarities with the editing of film.

So with Memory Theater, I wanted to apply this metaphor to music. Being a big fan of David Lynch, I am interested in how film and the dream-state inform each other, and how they might perhaps simulate reality.

Memories and dreams are like edited films, although the “editing” that the brain does seems purely random--although there may be times when events are more than a mere coincidence. Most of us dream in fragments, and when we awake, assemble the fragments into a meaningful narrative, connecting the dots into an identifiable shape. We see them as a sign of something that might happen to us in our lives, and in many instances they in fact do.

It’s also a bit like an “optical illusion” where the brain perceives something that is not inherently there, but becomes an emergent property of simultaneous, overlapping events.

If you are familiar with the geometric paintings of Piet Mondrian (Red, Yellow and Blue, 1921), you have noticed that where lines intersect, you see dots. As the eye and brain process the lines, this effect is automatically created by the brain.