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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The darkest, grandest noise of the musical season so far--the fanfare to an angry American autumn--was Michael Gordon's film symphony "Decasia," as played by fifty-five furiously committed students from the Manhattan School of Music, at St. Ann's Warehouse, in Brooklyn. The performance took place back in September, but the experience is still burned in my mind. Gordon, one of the founding members of the New York-based Bang on a Can collective, created "Decasia" in 2001, in collaboration with the filmmaker Bill Morrison, the director Bob McGrath, and the visual designer Laurie Olinder. The idea was to create a contemporary equivalent of Disney's "Fantasia," a dream procession of image and sound. Morrison assembled the film portion from ancient, decaying footage that he found in various archives. The images are stitched together in seemingly random order, yet they tell a hallucinatory tale. Camels trundle across a desert, children stampede through a nunnery, a man in a fez performs a dervish dance, parachutists descend from the sky. As the nitrate stock disintegrates, the images melt and shatter.
Gordon's score weds the hypnotic aura of minimalism to the detuned snarl of highbrow punk. It packs a punch on CD, but it needs a live...
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