Mirror with a film by Bill Morrison

The reclusive, yet brilliant Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemann return to the festival with their diaphanous, impressionistic drone duo, Mirror. Understated yet incredibly detailed, their slowly evolving and enthralling works flutter and quiver with elegantly restrained, miniature sound events. Haunting and muffled evocations of the original instrumentation of prepared piano or organ, droning guitar, bowed metal, warm strings, and a clutch of arcane, dark drones are carefully coerced into slowly burning compositions. Bill Morison’s work in essence celebrates the flimsy and transient nature of physicality, contorting old decaying film, abandoned for decades, into stunningly beautiful [and habitually dystopian] dirges to both birth and ruination.

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Although others have worked with rotting, decomposed film stock, Morrison has a peerless empathy for the enthralling flickering and punching motifs of moldering, atrophied celluloid – flowering, gaping holes and flickering smears flutter around the photographic content of the film stock, a constellation of found footage; a whirling Sufi dervish, nuns slowly hoving out of cloistered darkness, a boxer in a seemingly endless, futile spar with decay. Both dealing with ephemeral and often dark subjects, yet in beautiful restrained tones, this is a special collaboration, allowing both Mirror and Morison to offering unique insights into each others work.