The Boxhead Ensemble: Stories, Maps and Notes from the Half-Light
2001 European Live Performance and Film Screening Tour
co-curated by Braden King and Astria Suparak


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PRESS RELEASE : SUMMER 2001

The Boxhead Ensemble: Stories, Maps and Notes from the Half-Light
European Live Performance and Film Screening Tour

The first Boxhead Ensemble tour in nearly three years is set to begin in Amsterdam on September 19, 2001. Improvising to a stellar international program of new and existing short films curated by Braden King (Co-Director, Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks its Back) and independent curator Astria Suparak, the Ensemble will perform at events in The Netherlands, Belgium, France and the UK before finishing with two nights at the Doclands Festival in Dublin, Ireland.

Two Brothers, the latest CD by the Boxhead Ensemble, was also just released by Atavistic on August 21, 2001. For further information, click here.

Please direct further inquiries about the upcoming tour to: press@truckstopmedia.com



The musicians performing in this incarnation of the Boxhead Ensemble are:

MICHAEL KRASSNER - piano, organ, guitar
[Ensemble Director, Lofty Pillars, Simon Joyner, +...]

DAVID MICHAEL CURRY - viola, coronet, +
[Willard Grant Conspiracy, Empty House Cooperative, Thalia Zedek, +...]

FRED LONBERG-HOLM - cello, nylkaharpa
[In-Zenith, Pillow, Terminal 4, Freakwater, +...]

TIM RUTILI - Guitar, Organ
[Califone, Red Red Meat]

SCOTT TUMA - guitar, harmonica
[Souled American, +...]

MICK TURNER - baritone guitar, melodica
[Dirty Three, Tren Brothers, Bonnevill, +...]

JIM WHITE - drums and percussion
[Dirty Three, Cat Power, Smog, Nick Cave, +...]

-- Plus special guests in select cities. Complete musician biographies follow below --



The film program includes both new and existing short work by:

Stephanie Barber
Brian Coffey
Jem Cohen
Gustav Deutsch
Paula Froehle
Grant Gee
Gerard Holthuis
Peter Hutton
Braden King
Barbara Meter
Laura Moya
Julie Murray
Chris Petit
Seth Price
Guy Sherwin
Phil Solomon
Anita Thacher
Garine Torossian
Naomi Uman
Christopher Wilcha
+
-- Filmmaker credits and biographies follow below --



2001 TOUR ITINERARY:
Sept. 19 - The Paradiso, Amsterdam, NL
Sept. 20 - Patronaat, Haarlem, NL
Sept. 21 - Belgi‘, Hasselt, Belgium
Sept. 22 - 4AD, Diksmude, Belgium
Sept. 23 - Instants Chavires - Paris, France
Sept. 24 - The Horse Hospital, London, UK
Sept. 25 - Contact, Manchester, UK
Sept. 26 - Redgrave Theater, Bristol, UK (Presented by The Cube)
Sept. 27 - TBC
Sept. 28 - TBC
Sept. 29 - Doclands Festival, Dublin, Ireland
Sept. 30 - Doclands Festival Dublin, Ireland




MUSICIAN BIOGRAPHIES:

MICHAEL KRASSNER (ENSEMBLE DIRECTOR and TOUR CO-PRODUCER) Founder of the Boxhead Ensemble as well as sometime sideman for artists including Edith Frost, Simon Joyner, Tren Brothers and Songs:Ohia. His producing and recording credits are extensive, including Boxhead Ensemble, Simon Joyner, Manishevitz, Parker Paul, Songs:Ohia and his own band, the Lofty Pillars.

DAVID MICHAEL CURRY Hailing from Boston Mass, Multi-instrumentalist David Curry has found himself busy in an array of different projects, including the Willard Grant Conspiracy, Thalia Zadek (Come) and his own improvisational ensemble - The Empty House Cooperative.

FRED LONBERG-HOLM Lonberg-Holm is a top creative music cellist, active in a variety of projects in avant garde jazz, sound experimentation and modern composition. He studied cello with Ardyth Alton and Orlando Cole and composition with Morton Feldman, Anthony Braxton and Bunita Marcus. His early career was based in New York City, working with such artists as Peep, Anthony Braxton's Creative Orchestra, John Zorn. God is My Co-Pilot and Anthony Coleman's Selfhaters. Since moving to Chicago in the early 90's, Lonberg-Holm has been involved in such projects as the Light Box Orchestra and Pillow. He has also recorded with Ken Vandermark, Jim O'Rourke, Kevin Drumm and Peter Brotzman - to name a few. His recent work with Simon Joyner, Freakwater and the Lofty Pillars introduced Lonberg-Holm as one of the premiere arrangers in music today.

TIM RUTILI Tim Rutili's work with underground cult heroes Red Red meat established him as one of indie rock's most progressive and unique songwriters. His deconstructionist approach to folk Americana has found it's way through a number of projects, including Rex, Orso and Loftus. Califone's new album, Roomsound, is a further extension of his unique brand of contemporary folk, combining fahey-esque acoustic guitars with electronic and more experimental overtones.

SCOTT TUMA As the long time guitarist for Souled American, Tuma developed his achingly beautiful sense of suspended time and melodic deconstruction. With his solo instrumental record, Hard Again, released in 2001 on Truckstop records, Tuma expands on his palate to create a truly unique and mesmerizing aesthetic. Tuma also graces us with his recent work with the Boxhead Ensemble and Simon Joyner's Hotel Lives.

JIM WHITE Drummer for the Australian trio the Dirty Three and Boxhead Ensemble regular, Jim has also done drum duty for Nick Cave, Cat Power, Smog, Tren Brothers and Scott Tuma, among many others.

MICK TURNER Dirty Three guitarist Mick Turner began a solo career in 1997 with the release of Tren Phantasma, a collection of improvised four-track recordings featuring the contemplative guitar style he used with his group the Dirty Three. The following year, with Dirty Three band mate Jim White, Mick formed the duo Tren Brothers. In recent years, Turner has contributed guitar work for such luminaries as Cat Power, Boxhead Ensemble and the recent Get On Jolly EP, which features Will Oldham singing over a wash of Micks mesmerizing guitar loops and meanderings. Turner also recently released Pelican, an EP with his other duo project, Bonnevill (with violist Jessica Billey).



FILMMAKER BIOGRAPHIES:

BRADEN KING (USA) Braden King graduated from the University of Southern California in 1992 with a B.A. in Cinema-Television Production. His employment history includes stints for producer Karen Murphy (Drugstore Cowboy), Merchant-Ivory Productions and Gaumont Television in Paris, France. In addition to co-producing and directing Dutch Harbor as well as several short films, television segments and music videos, King was a founding partner in Chicago's TRUCKSTOP Media, a recording studio, video post-production facility and record label. King co-produced Dutch Harbor's original film soundtrack with composer Michael Krassner (see below), as well as two subsequent live CDs culled from European and domestic Dutch Harbor film screening tours which featured live musical accompaniment. In 1999, King moved to New York City, where he has founded TRUCKSTOP Media / NYC and was recently signed to the directing roster of documentary and commercial production company Corra Films.

LAURA MOYA (USA) Laura Moya has a background in documentary and fine art photography and anthropology. She has studied at Oxford, The Aegean Arts Center in Greece, and in Italy. Her interests in anthropology and photography led her to an interest in documentary form, with past projects including cataloging an extensive "underground" Soviet art collection, a project involving women in Hispanic communities in Northern New Mexico and an exhibited photographic essay, "Notes on Egypt". She has taught photography to inner-city children in Washington, D.C. and Anchorage, Alaska. In addition to co-producing and directing Dutch Harbor, Moya performed production work on The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein, a scripted film about the effects of the Gulf War, and did research for The Heart is Witness, a seven-part documentary on the global history of non-violence. She lives in Portland, Oregon and is currently developing several projects, including a photography/film project in India.

GRANT GEE (UK) Radiohead is his big calling card, but i know that there is a lot more there. he's just made a new film last year and i know that he does loads of other stuff...

JEM COHEN (USA) is a New York-based producer working in 16mm and 8mm film and video. His poetic, often ephemeral, work is marked by a blurring of the distinctions between documentary, narrative, and experimental genres. Cohen frequently shoots in hundreds of locations without any additional crew, in the tradition of documentary street photographers such as Robert Frank. His projects include collaborations with poets, writers, and bands such as R.E.M. and Fugazi, creating alternatives to generic and commodified ‘music video.’ Jem Cohen was the recipient of the Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award 2000, presented at the Dallas Video Festival.

NAOMI UMAN (LOS ANGELES and MEXICO CITY) makes labor-intensive, hand-processed films. Her film “Leche” won the Golden Spire Award for New Visions at the 1999 San Francisco Film Festival and has shown at festivals throughout the world. Her latest film, “Removed”, premiered at the 1999 New York Film Festival and won both the first prize, fiction category at Videoerotic and second prize, Juror's Citation at Black Maria. She was recently nominated for a Rockefeller Grant.

CHRISTOPHER WILCHA (USA) earned a BA from New York University in 1993 and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1999. He is currently at work on several new video and photo projects that examine how corporate, industrial and military forces have shaped the late twentieth century American landscape. He also has documentary projects in development at MTV and HBO. Last summer, Wilcha was an artist-in-residence at the Center for Land Use Interpretation's Wendover, Utah Studio. see also http://www.targetshootsfirst.com

PETER HUTTON (USA) “One of my primary objectives with cinema over the past 25 years has been to evoke a sense of wonder over the basic visual potential of a single shot as a vehicle to reflect on the origins of cinema and its relationship to the phenomenological nature of film, light and vision.” --PH

Filmmaker. Studied painting, sculpture, and film at the San Francisco Art Institute, B.F.A., M.F.A. Has produced more than fifteen films, most of which are portraits of cities around the world. Associate professor at Hampshire College and at Carpenter Center, Harvard University; visiting associate professor, SUNY at Purchase. Recipient of awards from the Yale Film Festival (first prize); Massachusetts State Council on the Arts; New York CAPS; New York Artists Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts; D.A.A.D. Berlin; New York State Council on the Arts. Recipient of Dutch Film Critics Award, Rotterdam Film Festival; Guggenheim Fellowship; Rockefeller Fellowship. Films exhibited at Museum of Modern Art (1978, 1988, 1994), Whitney Biennial (1985, 1990, 1995), National Film Theatre of London, Art Institute of Chicago, University of California, Rhode Island School of Design, Collective for Living Cinema, Toulon Festival, Film Forum, and Berlin Film Festival, among many others. Faculty, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. (1984) Professor of Film.

GUSTAV DEUTSCH (Austria) Born Vienna 1952. Drawings since 1962. Music since 1964. Photography since 1967. Architecture since 1970. Videos since 1977. Films since 1981. Sounds since 1981. Performances since 1983. In Austria, France, Germany, Luxembourg, England, Morocco, Greece and Turkey. Member of MEDIENWERKSTATT WIEN from 1980-1983. Member of DER BLAUE KOPRESSOR Floating & Stomping Company since 1983. Member of SIXPACK FILM since 1996. "Gustav Deutsch - an archaeologist of the cinema, studying the choreography of banality: a view on the subtle, hidden dancing steps of daily life." - Stefan Grissemann, Die Presse, Vienna

STEPHANIE BARBER (USA) a young filmmaker from Milwaukee, has one of the most original visions to emerge recently from the diverse experimental film scene. Deceptively simple at first, her work is unique in the way it alters and even suspends time.” --The Chicago Reader. She has recently shown at The New York Film Festival and had a solo show at The Museum of Modern Art.

PHIL SOLOMON teaches film aesthetics and film production at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure in 1998. Since arriving in Boulder in 1991, Mr. Solomon has produced, among other films, several collaborations with colleague Stan Brakhage. He is currently working on a feature length series of short films entitled The Twilight Psalms, a cinematic poem to the 20th century. The second film of the series, Walking Distance premiered at the New York Film Festival and won the Juror's Award (First Prize) at the Black Maria Film Festival.
Mr. Solomon's work resides in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Massachusetts College of Art, Binghamton University, Hampshire College, The Chicago Art Institute, San Francisco State University, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and the Oberhaussen Film Collection. He has been honored at many festivals, including Three First Prize awards at Black Maria, The Oberhaussen International Short Film Festival and Ann Arbor for his experimental films. Mr. Solomon received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994 and an Artist's Fellowship form the Colorado Council on the Arts in 1996-7. He has exhibited his films in every major venue for experimental film in Europe and the U.S. over the past twenty years, including the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Whitney Biennial, the Viennale, the Pacific Film Archive, the San Francisco Cinematheque, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Stadkino Cinema, Anthology Film Archives, Millennium, and three Cineprobes (one man shows) at the Museum of Modern Art. "Solomon has mastered the step-printer (a machine which permits precise, and if one wants, automated rephotography, reversal of the motion picture image, photography within the frame. It can be said of both him and (James) Herbert, then, that they proceed a frame at a time: there the similarity ends. Solomon disintegrates the entire pictorial 'fabric' (of what is mostly found-footage, or a 'gift' as he calls it) of old movies in various states of emulsion rot. He utilizes the organic mold and dry crack patterns, the natural decay of the footage, until the original subject matter, its anima, crawls with the textural 'maggots' of its own chemical decomposition and dissolves in a beautiful display of multi-faceted light. "As the subject most mattering to Solomon is children, the child's world, the effect of his various light textures (literally rung from the step printer's backlight as he bends every frame's illumination with his bare hands) is to re-create the photo-'dead' shadows of the lost world of childhood in direct opposition to every notion of the Romance of being young ... (most of his textural patterns appear to glow with aura, side-lit, back-lit, as if they were each rimmed with mirrors reflecting mirrors in a ripped skein-of-revelation ...) "... It is the 19th century 'tissue of lies' about childhood which Solomon rips open: his visual beauty, a biological beauty, is an encouragement to embrace this transformative mulch, this aesthetic compost, and to give up all commas ',', of hesitation - to accept suffering even (as does most of the animal kingdom most stoically) and revel in the 'fire of waters' (as poet Robert Kelley put it) that we all are ...." -Stan Brakhage, "Time ...on Dit," Musicworks, 1995 --*Donald Sutherland, in his great book On Romanticism characterized: ". (classical) ; (baroque) ," (romantic)

JULIE MURRAY (USA) "Julie Murray uses artful editing and inventive juxtapositions to make clichéd images come alive with new possibilities... she has somehow made images created by other people dance and twirl as if they were her own, discharging them by inference beyond the limits of her own personal will. Arcane and cerebral concepts such as 'the influence of water touching water' and '[illuminating] a vital sense innate to perception' (Murray) are executed with unexpected excerpts from almost familiar industrial, travel and educational films." -Scott Stark. Winner, Ten Best Films of 1997, Flicker Online Magazine

GERARD HOLTHIUS (The Netherlands, b. 1952) attended the Free Academy in The Hague. He is both a producer and filmmaker.

BARBARA METER (The Netherlands) “I was confronted with experimental film in the seventies for the first time and immediately engaged with it.
FROM THE EXTERIOR was the first experimental film I made. I was one of the founders of the Dutch Filmmakers Cooperative and curated a vast number of experimental film programs in Holland, which at that time were met with a lot of interest. The conflict which rose in especially British experimental film "circles" about the so-called "political relevance" of experimental film caused me to abandon experimental film in the mid-seventies. “I followed films concerning social issues for several years. For a number of reasons (cultural climate in Holland being one of them) it took until the middle of the '80s when I re-discovered it, which felt like meeting an old love. Since then I have made a number of experimental films again, starting with ANDANTE MA NON TROPPO. My films have been shown in many countries in Europe, in Japan and in the USA.” --BM

GUY SHERWIN (UK) lives in London and began making films in the early 1970’s. His films have shown in international avant-garde festivals: New York, San Francisco, Rotterdam, London, Melbourne. His work is supported by the Arts Council of England and the British Council. He is currently an associate lecturer in fine art film and video at the University of Wolverhampton, Middlesex University.

SETH PRICE (NEW YORK) graduated from Brown University in 1997. His work has screened at festivals including the New York Video Festival, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Berlin Transmediale, the Impakt Fetival. He lives in New York.

CHRIS PETIT (UK): famous for Radio On, etc. Radio On Remix...

BRIAN COFFEY (NEW YORK) "I shot one roll of S8 film every day for one month. Each day was conceived and edited to stand on its own. I was not concerned with there being a great deal of continuity between each piece. The film does not attempt to document and is not a journal in any traditional sense. Instead, the film is a collection of false starts, aborted attempts, and digressions."




BOXHEAD ENSEMBLE HISTORY

The first incarnation of the Boxhead Ensemble dates back to 1991 in Los Angeles, where Michael Krassner assembled a group of local musicians to improvise a score Braden King and Larry Stuckey's student documentary, "The Original Pantry Cafe". In 1996, Krassner assembled a new incarnation of the Ensemble to score Braden King and Laura Moya's lyric documentary, "Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks its Back". The resulting soudtrack, featuring performances by Joseph Ferguson, David Grubbs, Charles Kim, Michael Krassner, Douglas McCombs, Will Oldham, Jim O'Rourke, David Pavkovic, Rick Rizzo and Ken Vandermark was released to international acclaim by Atavistic in 1997. Shortly therafter, the Ensemble embarked on both European and U.S. tours, with a rotating lineup providing live soundtrack accompaniment to screenings of Dutch Harbor. The tours resulted in two additional CDs, "The Last Place to Go", a document of the European tour featuring Edith Frost, Ryan Hembrey, Charles Kim, Michael Krassner, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Will Oldham, Julie Pommerleau, Scott Tuma, Mick Turner, Ken Vandermark and Jim White, and "Niagara Falls", recordings from the U.S. tour featuring Jim Becker, David Grubbs, Ryan Hembrey, Charles Kim, Michael Krassner, Fred Lonberg-Holm and Darren Richard. On August 21, 2001, the Ensemble's latest CD, "Two Brothers" was released by Atavistic, with a new lineup rotation: Jessica Billey, Ryan Hembrey, Glenn Kotche, Michael Krassner, Fred Lonberg-Holm and Scott Tuma, plus David Michael Curry, Steve Doracke, Gerlad Dowd, Joe Ferguson, Guillermo Gregorio, Jeff Parker, Mick Turner, Jeff Tweedy and Jim White. "Stories, Maps and Notes From the Half Light" is the first Boxhead Ensemble tour in nearly three years. For further information on Boxhead Ensemble, see Atavistic's website.




ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
Please direct further inquiries about the upcoming tour to: press@truckstopmedia.com

Additional ensemble, filmmaker and tour information can also be found at:
www.truckstopmedia.com
www.astriasuparak.com
www.doclands.ie
www.atavistic.com


Support for Boxhead Ensemble: Stories, Maps and Notes From the Half-Light has been provided by Corra Films, New York. www.corrafilms.com.