I said to Kat “this is the hardest movie I’ve ever made! I don’t think I can do it.” And she said,  “you say that every time – you said it with the last movie, and the one before that!” And I said “really???” And she said “yes!” And I said “but this time I really mean it!” And she said, “you said that last time too!” 

I made a new film portrait of the great composer Annea Lockwood, which I am very excited about! I know there’s an infinite amount of stuff online, but I would be thrilled if you’d take a look. If you know about Annea Lockwood, you know that she’s a lovely spirit and great muse. If you don’t know her – this is a good intro. She’s one of the smartest people about sound and listening out there. She’s made fantastic music, sound art, and performance for more than 50 years. And she’s a profoundly warm and generous person. It was a great creative challenge to try to make cinema about sound. The film is up and free all month at the Counterflows music festival website: https://counterflows.com/annea-lockwood-a-film-about-listening/

This week, JD Samson and I shared a new iteration of 7 Sounds at the Sundance Film Festival as part of their New Frontiers program. We’ve done a few versions of the project before — at IDFA and the Headlands Center for the Arts — but this 30-ish minute piece featured seven brand new sounds, and was something like a cross between a radio documentary, a sound walk, and ASMR. We asked listeners joining our livestream from around the world to listen to it in bed. It was wonderful to be back at Sundance and to share this latest version of 7 Sounds with new folks. Stay tuned for updates on the longer project JD and I are developing, 32 Sounds. 

JD Samson and I were thrilled to have 7 Sounds featured as the opening night performance at IDFA’s new media program, do {not} touch. The show was streamed simultaneously by listeners all over the world. Looking ahead to 2021, we’ll be pushing the piece forward in exciting new ways, and will have some exciting news to share very soon.

I filmed recently with the great avant-garde composer Annea Lockwood for my new documentary on sound. Annea was recording the Hudson River with a hydrophone. She’s a hero of mine, so it was a huge pleasure. I’m looking forward to featuring her and her work!

I did a live-streamed short piece called 7 Sounds for the Headlands Center for the Arts with my great collaborator JD Samson. It’s hard to know what to call things at this point – was it a radio documentary? A sound walk? A live podcast? Who knows? In any event, it was a 20-minute mostly audio piece about sound. People were encouraged to sit outside on a park bench or a rooftop or in a backyard to experience it. It was a sketch using materials for the longer live cinema piece I’m working on called 32 Sounds. This shorter work was streamed live (it doesn’t exist in anything but that ephemeral form) and included sounds and thoughts from Annea Lockwood, David Harrington, Christine Sun Kim, Mazen Kerbaj, and a few others. It was super fruitful and also quite fun to put together. Sound is a great and endlessly interesting muse for me. Stay tuned for updates on the project.

The Kronos Quartet and I are doing some final shows of A Thousand Thoughts in 2019. We’ll be screening the piece outdoors in Big Sur at Phillip Glass’ Days and Nights Festival and then on to Australia for two screenings at the Melbourne Festival. We have a bunch more shows in 2020: Dallas, Santa Fe, Berkeley, Seattle and many other cities. More info here.

It’s been a busy fall, touring with both A Thousand Thoughts and The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller. The Kronos Quartet, Yo La Tengo and I have done screenings in Las Vegas, San Diego, Bannf, and more to come: Big Sur, Duke, Melbourne Australia. At the same time, I’ve been able to sneak in a few shoots related to some new and exciting projects. It’s been a busy and good time around here at the Free History Project, which in case you don’t know is the nonprofit we set up many years ago when making The Weather Underground and is still the org that produces and owns the copyright to all my work.