So I have a really formal question that might be directed to Anjali because she's my fellow geek. But so, and I want to try and relate it to the conversations that we're having in our class about frequency. So one of the ways in which we've been talking, not one of the ways. The way we've been talking about frequency is as frequency being a modality of registering black life at a number of different registers. So at a sonic register, frequency
being something that registers as sound in pitches, registering also as a form of temporality, repetition in intervals and rhythms, frequency registering kinetically as movement in particular velocities and intensities, frequency as haptic, an effective modality of contact, and frequency is visual, being the modality through which all these other registers of frequency are triggered. So in this particular work, one of the formal things that I find so interesting is to think
about the way in which you're formally registering frequency through the diptych. right? And it's something that I've actually been wondering about a lot, about what does the diptych allow a filmmaker to do and why. When in this particular film the split screen of the diptych does something, and I'm not going to say what it does for me, but I want to know why that is a a formal choice for you two in trying to render this tension that Eastman is trying to sustain, not even
like articulate, but sustain between things like the nigger and the gorilla. And he's trying to do those musically. So why the diptec? Is this on? I don't feel it's on. It's on. It just doesn't project. It's just for the camera. Oh, I see. Oh, yeah. So you still have to shout. OK. So there are a number of different registers and reasons for using the diptych that sort of might respond to your question on frequency.
The first is the conundrum of the piece itself and how we thought about filming it in relation to the fact that it is written for two baby grand pianos or four pianos, but it can be played on two pianos. We thought about four pianos, but that would have been extremely expensive to then have cameras on all the pianos three cameras because as you can see the cameras are overhead to the side you know there's three cameras filming Kojo can talk a bit more about the takes and I'll stick to the diptych side but the the the the
reason we used two screens was because we found it necessary to use two screens for this particular piece we don't just like go around biennale's and think oh there are these really there are these artists who have got all this money in there like lining the walls with screens we didn't really think that was reasonable or necessary we never have we don't we think a lot about why we use screens we absorb different screens and their and their thinking and the way we think with screens within single screen works and to put that in an edit is already difficult enough so then to think about how to edit this was an
editing challenge because you're having two pianists on each piano so how we we edit how we edited that is a whole other conversation but I think the the idea of it was that there were a number of so that was the formal reason that you're hearing the piece being played by these four musicians but then you and the camera are the third measure in a way you are the third person you are the you are watching, well the camera is watching and what is that doing? So when he says Eastman, when Dante and Elaine who basically are reading from an introduction not a speech because this was an introduction
given by Eastman in 1980 wasn't it Northwestern in defence of the work and the use of the N word term. So when Eastman describes what he does with that term then is he kind of sets up he sets it up as a kind of he sets it up as a mobile as a mobility in a way whereby he determines he takes the term the n-word as a limit and describes it and puts it in its place as part of the economic system in terms of slavery then he goes into this Then he aligns that term to other struggles.
Interestingly, he doesn't talk about the Mozambique guerrilla movements or the Congolese movements. He talks about guerrilla movements happening in the Middle East. And when you think about that, that's very interesting, how he aligns the political... And this is almost prophetic, right? Because he's aligning the cause of slavery and being gay at this point, to being a gorilla, which is almost prophetic because he absorbs the formal compositionally, creates this third, proposes this third part, takes this binary and proposes a third part, and then I don't want to be
flippant and use the term queer, but let's say he kind of takes this abusive term with the politics of what it might mean in the future to be guerrilla and gay. And then when we think about what that means, the idea gay comes out of, at that time, probably comes out of a Western urban milieu, rather than being aligned to a guerrilla movement. So he puts that, he puts the, it's so prophetic, because it's like saying, in the future, being gay will mean being militant, being as clever as a guerrilla who is working, and of course by describing Palestine and Afghanistan, he is also in its absence describing Bangladesh
or describing the networks of forest, complex networks of guerrilla movements that occurred inside complex natural environments. So he is, you know, he is asking, he's asking, he's putting attention also in terms of what it means to be gay. So he's not at home with any particular term. I would say the term he is most at home with is the term guerrilla, in all of those terms, actually. So I think the question of the diptych, one can then begin to see in terms of the gay guerrilla, but also in terms of the...
I mean, it's just extremely folded, right? And then the labour of the edit, of the piece itself, and the way it moves between screens is a whole other... Yeah, maybe some people don't know that, you know, when we made this work for the Sharjah Biennial, it's actually a two-screen piece. It's not one split screen, it's two like that. Two screens like this. And so part of what Anjali is alluding to is the formal resemblance to two pianos. And then in the installation, we have two seating arrangements which allude to the shape of the pianos. And then you could see this overhead lighting system,
like neon tubes in the form of two triangles. And in the installation, this neon tubing system sits above the audience. So when the two screens finish, the neon tube light snaps on. And you're drenched in light for eight minutes. And there's a countdown. And then it all starts again. And then when the countdown stops, the lights go off. And then you're plunged back into darkness. So in the installation, everything is doublings and echoes and illusions. But what is enjoyable is that these doublings play host
to this third part. So these formal resemblances somehow turn into a three-part structure within a two-part structure. So the simplicity of the doublings gets disrupted in the way Angelika's pointing out. But you wouldn't even necessarily experience this until you sat through it once. And then you're like, where's the third part? What third part? Everything is twos and fours and eights and sixteens and 32s. What's the third part? And then it's like, oh, the third part is the structural relation between me, the camera, and what I've seen. And then you start to do the kinds of projections,
the kind of prospective dimension of what you're seeing starts to take hold. That's part of what's going on, I think. Thank you. Go ahead. I mean, I sort of wanted to pick up on, you know, the way that you started us out by thinking about the diptych and the sort of dyad, right? And then, you know, I think Anjali and Kojo, or you're talking about the way that structurally Eastman's aesthetics really break free of that dyadic structure and shift perspective and dimensionality and accumulate and add on a kind of third tier, third
dimensional tier. And I'm wondering what that has to do with or how that can be related back to. And I know I'm not in your class, unfortunately, but what you're saying about frequency is really interesting to me, particularly with respect to bringing it back around to Eastman's aesthetic, which was largely about, I think, attuning to accumulation, a kind of accumulation accumulational aesthetic. And I'm thinking about particularly the structure between the recital and the mode of address, and the way that temporality or time passes between those who are addressing us
and those who are reciting or who are performing. And I'm wondering what that sort of third accumulational dimension, how that warps the temporality between recital and mode of address. Yeah. I mean. And then I have a follow-up thing too. Exactly. You know when I keep going, I can't stop. Yeah, well, pause. Just a pause. I'll bring it back. I think that the piece is not really about doubling at all. It's more about insistence and duration and vigilance
and ecstasy. And exhaustion, maybe. Yeah. And exhaustion and work and attunement and a kind of esprit de corps. It's really about all of those things. And that kind of the two part sets up a kind of minimal ethics of antiphony. Sets up a kind of dimension of call and response, which it then, in a way, you set that up in order to provide a point of departure, which is then multiplied massively. So the work is about constraint and unlimitedness
within the constraint. Part of it is that there are, as Angelica pointed out, there are three cameras. So it's recorded over a weekend. So it's six takes. So what you hear is take five, sonically. But what you see is 18 takes. So what we've done is edit 18 takes to be guided by the 27 minutes of one real-time performance. So you hear in real time, but you see in multiplying time. What you see is an impossible composition of 18 takes,
which is guided by insistence. So in that sense, the pianists are the director. In that sense, the cameras are the performers. In that sense, clearly Eastman is the choreographer. The score is choreographing the pianists, and the pianists are guiding the edit. And we've set up a condition in which we're following that edit, because the aim is to make Eastman's music not only the subject or the content, but the substance. And this is why sometimes it's that Eastman's music
effectively is the director. And that's what we've set up. So the relation between the mode of address and the mode of response is in a way diagonally cut across by a question of making a video that is edited according to, and in the greater glory of Eastman's compositional method. And that's very much the, that's our, that's not only our homage, That's a way of making Eastman's music matter to us in 2017,
so that it has the urgency that we felt in the time of making. And it also takes a certain kind of stand. We think of the work as taking a stand on and with and from his music. Like we didn't go outside and have shots of Trump or shots of Theresa May or something. We stayed in that studio. Thank you. Yes. But we stayed in that studio for two days. And then the work comes from that studio, and it never leaves it. I mean, I want to come back to your follow up, but one of the things that we've been talking about in class
is the structure of spectatorship. And what you said, Anjali, about the diptych is necessary in order to create a third. And without the creation of the diptych, then it's just dialogical, if that. And if you take seriously the third part of the third measure, how do you construct a triangulated form of spectatorship that is not privileging any given part. And so you're being very, very imaginatively true to what the third part having to contain all of the information prior.
And so there's a beautiful way in which you're also doing that beyond the diktek in that the sort of temporality of the interval. So starting with one reading, right? And then the performance and coming back to another very different effective reading, right? And so that the viewer has to then make that triangle, be the third part who witnessed this beginning, who witnessed the performance, who witnessed the last part, and needs to then complete it. And so one of the things that you're doing is you're actually making the third part of the third measure bear the burden, us bear the burden of completion.
And I mean, it's kind of extraordinary that to be able to stand back against this and to think about it in relationship to other diptychs where that's not necessarily the case, where the creation of the two screens is literally the consumption of two screens. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they have to work to activate something, right? And you put that so beautifully. I mean, I really wanted Elaine to finish the piece, because Elaine is a vocal performer in the new music scene in London, in the UK and in the world. She's a brilliant experimental vocalist. And I knew, and both of them, both the performers, Dante
and Elaine are both, we both loved Eastman. We found Dante the night before actually, to perform that piece. We needed, I just put it out there and I was like, it has to come somehow, we've got several hours left. And it did. And then Elaine performed, what Elaine does is that she actually does that. She actually creates that third space because she is using her voice in many different registers. And she is intensifying it and using emotion in her voice and loudness and quietness in order to also just explore the composition itself as a vocalist.
So she's, I mean, the other thing is that the work itself goes through all these incredible crescendos and moments of slowing down and speeding up. And I mean, that is, it so works with the way we work in terms of the experiments we make with the essayistic or how cinema works, you know, in order to produce structures of feeling and speeds and different registers and moments of quiet and moments of crescendo, where things build and then they separate and then you're brought back inside, you're brought back into a space that is familiar but it's not familiar.
So the challenge of making a video film out of a piece of music was for us a really beautiful challenge and we spent a lot of time watching watching many films or looking at photographers who'd photographed pianists. And we noticed that many of them hadn't actually focused on the hands. ANNA KALALAXI- I mean, that was something else to me about in terms of the haptic dimension of making music, which in this particular film is vertical as opposed to horizontal.
so that the keyboard is actually a horizontal instrument. But what you saw is you saw the vertical, like two-handed playing of a single note. The two-handed playing of a single note. You know, which, I mean, to me, is extraordinary to be able to talk about the way in which a piano becomes enacted as a rhythm instrument. So it's not simply about the tone or the pitch. It's literally about the resonation of a single note over and over again in tandem with four
others. Yeah, I mean, I was really captivated by that. But I wanted to come back to your follow-up. No, I mean, actually, so I was trying to find a way to go back to my follow-up question, and this precisely is the way. I think what you're saying is so wonderful, because it really is about a kind of transversal form, right, where the haptic is felt vertically and not horizontally, as you're saying with the piano. And I think what that does is, first of all, I think it sort of produces the piano as this kind of sensuous object for touch. And it also, I think, attunes us to touch
and makes us think about precisely touch in relation to frequency. But it's also about the multiplication of one note, of the single note in a way that produces a kind of mania and a kind of frenzy. Maybe those aren't the words, but I think the kind of manicness that Eastman was interested in is something that interests me precisely, Kojo, when we were having this conversation in London a few years ago, how that sort of manicness gets left out of and forgotten in the genealogy of minimalism, the kind of minimalist genealogy that you said you first
encountered when you were exposed to Terry Riley and Steve Reich and Philip Glass and all these folks. But then there's something about the way Eastman gets forgotten from this genealogy or left out. And I'm wondering if there's something about accumulation and mania that his aesthetic becomes excessive to that genealogy, even pathological kind of. Can I add one thing to that? Because I really want to hear your answer, too, which is that the way in which that is visually managed, right, by the pianist, is by this gaze, this gaze that either looks up, that closes its eyes, that focuses on a single spot,
and that I think you're absolutely right. It's like, and how do you manage that mania when the placid faces of the people who are actually performing it are at complete odds with what they're performing? Yeah, those are really good points. I think at a certain point, we started thinking of Eastman's music as sacred music, like that ecstatic hammering that Eastman demands from his pianists. The level of insistence and emphasis requires them to invent a whole gestural vocabulary.
So then the moments when the hands are standing up on stilts like plucked chickens, or when they seem to be hopping. And there's moments when they seem to be clawing. And then there's moments where they seem to be stabbing. I mean, just an entire repertoire of a whole gestural economy that evokes when Cecil Taylor talks about the piano as 88-tuned drums. That's clearly. And for us, there's a kind of, for us, Eastman has more to do with Cecil Taylor, not in terms of jazz registers, but in terms of virtuosic gay African-American composers
who are also disruptive to their virtuosity. They put their virtuosity at the service of disruption. They're totally formally trained. Eastman was trained at Curtis Institute, which 10 years before had turned down Eunice Waymans before she became Nina Simone. They turned her down flat. And the racism of that, it explains why there is so much, why Nina Simone is often in a love and hate relationship with performance, with R&B, with popularity as such, because she saw herself as a conservatory-trained composer.
That's what she aimed to do. And they turned it down. But Eastman, 10 years later, went through that whole process, years and years of training, and then was in Buffalo. So he was totally inside of new music. But clearly, it's very different to call your work music from 18 musicians and then to call your work gay guerrilla. That's a world away. There never was a figure like Eastman. So he played a black dada nihilismous figure. Clearly, he played that transgressive role while being at the heart of the new musical world.
And part of what you're pointing to is that that kind of virtuosically transgressive figure and the insistence of it is indicative of the effort required to erase a figure like that. So when you discover Ismail, when you go onto YouTube and you listen to Unjust Malaise, the triple CD, which we did back in 07 or something, and the sheer, you're like, OK, I've listened to so-called minimal music as long as I can remember. You know. Hi. Sorry. Sorry. OK. Maybe you want to join in.
No, that was Julius Eastman. Come in, Julius. We've been waiting for you. So yeah, so when you hear it, it's so shocking, because you consider yourself a fan of this music. You're following it all. And then a figure of this magnitude, the effort required to erase that project of this stature, is so enormous that it's actually terrifying. Because clearly, there is an effort to erase Eastman's existence as a black avant-garde composer, of whose project was entirely to be both at the heart
of a project and to be disruptive of the coherence of that. So we go into this thinking a lot around Fred Moten's that moment in In the Break where Fred says, you know, he says, you know, it may be that the coherence of the avant garde depends upon its notion of a necessary anti-blackness or a necessary non-whiteness. That the coherence of the avant garde depends upon it seeing itself as necessarily white. And he says that may be taken as an exaggeration,
but it's not far from the truth. He says this. And so the question of the coherence of the avant-garde, the coherence of its whiteness, is clearly been mobilized not only to expel and to erase Eastman, but to unequally integrate him at the level of an exception. But the point of Eastman is he's not an exception. He's at the heart. He's at the heart of what it means to be a black composer, which effectively means to decompose and to recompose what it means to compose.
This is part of the project. To be a black composer is to compose and recompose composition as such. So the implications of Eastman's work for us begin from the music and then have implications for all art forms. This is why there were three white musicians and one Parsi musician who's Indian-Australian. But for us, clearly, this is a black film. For us, a black film is not determined by who is in front, by the subjects in the film.
It is not necessary or sufficient to have four black pianists playing the music. What is required is for us, the artists, to declare a kind of, to find a means and a method for declaring the blackness of a work as an open experiment in which the condition of blackness is unlimited in advance and is not to be prescribed in advance by questions of content or subject or form. So that's part of what's at stake. But in a way, taking Eastman's project to its fullest
means, in a way, authorizing ourselves to make that statement with this work. But he's also doing that himself by disidentifying from a number of categories. Right. Yes. Yes. So that is the kind of, that is the, for us as artists, what we always try to do in our work. Thank you. I mean, I want to just open it up briefly to some conversation. Yeah, so I've been sitting on this for a minute. It's not really a question. The question is whether you think about that to describe what I am sort of active in your process of making the work.
I noticed as the music began that the word measure started to pop in my head quite frequently. Sorry, frequently. It's a temporality, too. I was thinking measure in terms of the delimitation of an interval, and measure in terms of an effort at establishing a weight, and measure it to eventually transmute it into count, and became like commodity. And I noticed that wherever the music in the round came back into something close simultaneous alignment, that a sense of the radical contiguity, separate but connected
gestures was lost and it felt more and more like there was just one voice, right? And that actually part of what was constitutive of an experience of some things being simultaneous but differentiated was that distance, was that interval, was that kind of the capacity to have a measure. And so there's a weird way in which there's syncopation happening that synthesizes a multitude. Tina began talking about frequency and relationships and modalities of multiple registers of black life. And so I was thinking about this phrase, differentiation without separability, which I know, Rizvana, for instance, can speak too much more eloquent than I can. And the way that that figures in the materiality and the sonic registers
of the piece and I was also thinking about the triangle as a figure and the way that it's constantly in pursuit of itself and never self-identical right and that its completion is sort of arrives through departure right so that's a sort of opposition to the square or to the circle and so those are things I was experiencing kind of in the substance of the piece I don't know if there's ideas that will resonate for you in your exploration to finding a way to make images from sound. No, those are beautiful responses. Maybe one way to do it is that for us, this video involved us breaking, in a way, a methodology
that we've always adopted, which is one we take from Chris Marker, which is the kind of the asynchronicity of sound and image. So if the image is doing one thing, the sound does another, and it's the audience who joins them. That means if you have the sound of a piano, you never show a piano. You never show a piano. You show anything except a piano. So that asynchronism, that divergence of sound and vision is what we've always tried to invent new methods of asynchronism. So for us to make this work was a huge confrontation with ourselves, because here we try to do the opposite. We try to synchronize sound and image as tightly as possible.
And there's a phrase in the industry called Mickey Mousing. This phrase Mickey Mousing is when the sound image synchronization is so tight that they both become redundant. They mutually make each other redundant, and therefore pointless. They over determine each other. So we had many, many arguments and discussions about this. like, do we dare to Mickey Mouse? Do we dare to do it? I mean, really. So it was really a big challenge. But then when we did it, when we looked at the footage, we realized something amazing, which was that because of the simultaneity, because of the simultaneity, you actually, when you did these synchronized edits,
Your eyes could not resolve what you were hearing. So there actually was no Mickey Mousing, even and especially when we insisted on it. Because there are certain points where you see the fingers hammering, but you can't tie the sound to the fingers. You can, and then you lose it. And then it comes back, and then you lose it. You're like, that pianist is making that sound at that time. But then when all four are going, it gets difficult. The sound is getting distributed between fingers. So we realized that redundancy is an intermittent moment within this kind of compounded and accumulative times.
And I think that's part of your first response connects to that. So we found that through confronting our own internal rules. I would also say difference without separability is Denise De Silva. Yeah, Denise's prayer De Silva. But I think I've been thinking about this a long time in relation to what race means from a inner city British context. I've been thinking about it in terms of convivial antagonisms, forms of living together that involve confrontation
and difficulty and argument and with moments of resolution and moments of action and inaction. difference without separability is, I think, something that we did try to activate in terms of what Kojo just said in the beginning, which was this kind of sense of an esprit de corps, by enhancing the, by giving the pianists this makeup, which, you know, joins them in some way. And then their nails as well. and the fact that they're all wearing black. You know, maybe just to talk a little bit about the pianists,
we didn't just go and hand pick four pianists. I mean, there's only a few people that can actually play Julius Eastman together in Europe. There's very few people who can play. So this group had been playing. We met them at a concert in London. And there were actually all the students of the older person in the, what's his name, Ron? Rolf Hines. ROLF Hines, yeah, who's an amazing musician himself. And they're all the students of Rolf Hines. And Rolf Hines meditates a lot. And so that's why you see them in these kind of meditative poses, even when Elaine is screaming at the end.
You know, they are like jurors in a future court, you know, where she is making a statement in some way. And the sense of the esprit de corps, I think, for us, was actually about building those intensities of what it means to live with difference and without . Yeah, because initially we wanted Afro-diasporic musicians, pianists, who exist. But the question was not. I mean, the majority of new musicians are white,
but they are undoubtedly. Chamber musicians. Yeah, there were many, many Afro-diasporic experimental pianists. The point is not the number or the presence. The point was the duration needed to build an ensemble. That's what we realized when we started trying to do it. We realized, oh, an ensemble has to rehearse. They have to become comfortable. And you can't force an ensemble to become an ensemble. You can't force a process. Some months are ticking by, and we're trying to compress the ensemble process. And at a certain point, we realize we're not going to make it. We can't condense that time of rehearsal, the time of the kind of sociality required
to come together around this work. We're not going to be able to accelerate it. It will take the time it takes. And you have to accept that it might not work. And you might have to do it again. You can't force musicians to become an ensemble. That was the point at which we saw these musicians playing Actually, the first time after, it was December 2016, so after nine years of listening to Eastman, it was the first time we saw an Eastman concert live, played by musicians live. And over three nights, these musicians were playing. And it was a great experience. And after a while, we realized we have to tap into the fact
that these musicians have already been playing together for a decade. We have to parasitize that ensemble, ride on the dynamics of their esprit de corps, and adopt it for us. Otherwise, we're not going to make it. Because there is no way we can condense 10 years of working together into three to six months. We just can't do that. So having decided to work with them, then the question was, we need to build an aesthetic arrangement that doesn't apologize for the fact that they are white pianists, but actually exaggerates it. Creates an actual mise-en-scene in which the chromatic dynamics, which are much more exaggerated in the installation,
because we shot it on 4K. It's the first time we shot on 4K. That means that the dark areas of the screen are hyper dark. You can't see. Just because we graded them like that. Yeah, so the colour correction means that you actually, you can't see the distinction between the sweatshirts they're wearing, the background, and the room that you are watching it in. This is not 4K, this is a low resolution file. So you can see the curtains on the back, and you can see all these things, but in the 4K version you can't. It's just one giant dark, it's a giant darkness. It's a thrilling blackness. And out of this blackness looms these white faces, which we exaggerated.
The whiteness is not supposed to be realistic. It's supposed to be from, yeah, and also slightly from a future world. They are the gay guerrillas who Eastman could not find in 1980. He steps onto this concert hall, the stage at Picksteiger Hall in Northwestern on 16th January 1980. and he gives that statement. And so what we imagined was 37 years after that statement, here they come. Because he doesn't say the gay gorillas are black or white. He just says he can't see them yet. So we try to give a face and a form to the gay gorillas of the future. And these minimal signifiers of silver nail polish and silver makeup
up, and the polo necks, all of these are designed to suggest that they're slightly removed from our world. And the sternness, the severity, the focus, all of those things are designed to indicate something like super soldiers or scientists or samurai, just figures who've come to us to train us in spectatorship. But they are already like that. I mean, they're like athletes. They are like that. But I do remember telling them, because we had two days, so they do two takes on Saturday and four takes on Sunday. I remember telling them this, like, we want you to be as severe and as solemn and as austere
as possible. So I know we've gone late. I want to ask if there's maybe one or two questions that we can bundle because we started late, we've gone late. People are tired. But I do want to often just to open up to maybe one or two more questions. Arnav, go ahead. I'll just follow up on that last question. What you were talking about kind of the asynchrony between image and sound. I was just thinking about, I took a whole class on minimalist music, and it's part of what you're saying is that we didn't even talk about Eastman at all. And what we talked about was the technology with tape phasing and what Wright does, of course, and what Riley does. So I'm thinking about whether phasing is a kind of process
that came into play here. Because multiple times it's mentioned that the third part is kind of an accretive moment of the two. It should contain the two in that it should add up, or the audience as being the third part kind of is a combination of the two. So I was just wondering whether you see it as kind of going towards a unifying moment, that third part, or whether it's kind of an asynchronous phase, of like a tape phase, where they start off at the same place, but they don't ever quite end up in that third place. I just wanted to. That's a great question. And then Tony, go ahead. I just wanted to tag team a little bit on that. I mean, it seems as though there's a weird phenomena where something is composed out of very discrete and localized
units almost. And then at times, because of associative effects for the listener, perhaps, you hear drones, or you hear melodic fragments that maybe in reality are not there, but are kind of result of precise, close timings in rhythm. Sort of like one minute it seems very rhythmic and very specific, and then there are these overtones that seem to come from nowhere that are kind of artifacts from the repetition. Absolutely. Go ahead. I mean, this might sound strange, but I think there are certain pieces of music and certain films and certain works of art
that stay with you forever your whole life. So in that, you never reach a point of understanding. They just retain a force within themselves that continues to elude any kind of arrival, because they are timeless works. And I think there wasn't a point of arrival in that third space. There's no point of arrival. And I think Eastman's music aesthetically produces his politics. So because this, and also in terms of what Kojo
was saying about the, just before we go to your point, Kojo was just saying about the whiteness of the musicians. I mean, from a British context, it's like when you've gone through the 80s and they're celebrating the Asian underground, they're like celebrating all this stuff and then you've got Benetton adverts everywhere and then it's like you feel like your entire identity has been Benettonized and you're like no I hate that person and my anger is valid and there's no happy family and you know there's all this money going into everyone being happy and celebrating festivals and whatever it was nice it was really nice when there was that attention paid to having Indian classical music in the Royal
Festival Hall all night, or you know Sufi music in Regent's Park, or like supporting black and Asian artists and cultural organisations in which is all gone now. But I think what one learnt through that those processes was not to arrive in them and feel okay now we've made it. Now we are celebrated black artists in Britain. We are fine, we've arrived. I think that sense we always mistrusted. So for us Eastman was Eastman's work. For us both produces a kind of a politics that just
keeps on sedimenting in one's consciousness around these questions of identity. But I think what you describe is some of the mechanics of that in terms of the way that the sound continues to produce things that might not be there or that are there. Certainly the piano, when you're hitting it that hard, But it is producing a kind of drone sound in some way. And I mean, yeah. I was just going to, just quickly. I mean, your question is really interesting, because what it makes me think about is stretching the inter-Vaelic, right, temporally. Because I think the sort of overtones
and the production of sound that's not readily there or given is also about the multiple conjurings of Eastman, Right? And the sort of future ghosts of Eastman and the gay gorillas or whatever. So there's a kind of, I think, tonal multiplication of the figure. Right? Absolutely. And Eastman as excessive to a kind of historicity or something that I think is interesting. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, at certain points, you hear feedback. You hear these, like, you hear things almost distorting rumblier and you know you're not even sure where those come from and they're clearly they're overtones they're aggregate effects they're a surplus
that's engendered and you know it could be that they they they can be understood in relation to those moments where you see everything but you can't join everything you can't see all those fingers but you can't place those fingers in relation to all the sounds you're hearing there are surpluses being and engendered all the time. This is part of what Eastman was invoking in his notion of organic music. That sounds kind of seasonal, and that sounds that it sounds like a question of harmonic balance. But it's not a question of harmonic balance. It's a question of a kind of generative, a kind of engendering generativeness
that his project sets up the conditions for. And we had to find four methods to continue the transmission of that. So even though we'd been listening to Eastman's music since 07, by the time we come to make this video in February 2017, there was what we call Eastmania. I mean, you've noticed it, right? There were concerts in honor of Eastman. There were recitals, there were reissues, all of which are great. But we did want to make a work which was not only, it wasn't only commemorative because we didn't, because the kind of the apologia and the expiation and the apologies that underscore those commemorations
in which institutions are effectively apologising for erasure. That's what's at stake in all the commemorations. They are apologies. And that wasn't what we wanted to do. We think those apologies are necessary but not sufficient. They are insufficient, in fact. Necessary and insufficient. And what we wanted was something like what Glisson calls a prospective history of the present. so we wanted to make Eastman prospective and we wanted to make him contemporary and these these dedications to Mark Fisher who obviously had just died and we were recording at the same time as his at the same time is his there was a giant reception a giant kind of memorial at Goldsmiths and it was
It was the Saturday. It was the Sunday, and we were recording on that Sunday. And the dedication to the movement for Black Lives. So we wanted to orient the retrospective, commemorative apologias and expiations. We wanted to orient them towards a certain kind of perseverance and a certain kind of insistence. And what might seem like a cliche now, but a certain kind of resilience, the resources required for resilience. That's how we thought of it, because at the moment of making, I was pretty angry. The combination of Marx's death, the combination of the election of Trump,
what was going on in Britain, that's enough to drive you... Insane. Yes, yes. And so at this point... Sparing. Yes, at this point it's about setting up a certain kind of condition in which you can come face to face with the resources required for resilience and for persistence and for insistence. And this is part of what we tried to mobilise. I think that oh one more go ahead this is a fascinating work and discussion I was wondering if you could talk about the camera
and the subjectivity of the camera and the nature of the well the gaze the cinematic gaze we just had a long a cross about that So this is acropos of everything. Well, I wasn't at the dinner. But you did it, and we welcome it. Well, very briefly, I'll say, do you want to start? Well, I'll start. So yeah, briefly, like the gays, I mean, we had a lot of discussions about the camera operators. Our DOP is a woman. And we decided we didn't want any men on set unless they were assistants of the women.
Because they just, in such a small environment, they just create a hetero, I don't want to say that. But let's just say that a certain kind of director of photography in a very closed environment creates problems. and behave like peacocks strutting around bosses. And it just wouldn't have worked. So we just decided no men behind the cameras. And we continue to, since then, have no men behind cameras. So that produces, I think, a very different sensitivity in a room, literally. To have women behind cameras, close up, filming the pianists,
really produced a different energy. Yeah, three female camera operators is quite unusual. So we're in a studio. The thing is that even the baby grand pianos take up huge amounts of space. So that means you can't get too close with those cameras. So those cameras are actually as far from the piano as possible. but they clearly have long lenses. So the cameras are far, but the lens is as close as it can be. They weren't that far. Well, I mean, they were as far as we could make them within the context. Without getting in the way. So you get these close-ups, which are not available in a live performance. You can't see the fingers in that way. I mean, you have this third camera, which is moving around.
And this third camera, which gives you the sense of being on a vessel, like an unstable ground. So you have locked cameras, and then you have the unstable ground of a handheld camera. And working with these three was about what we call the recomposition, in which the 18 takes of these three cameras provide the resources required to recompose Eastman's music at the level of a kind of assembled, impossible, fictional music. You know, a fictional video. The music happened, but if you were there filming, you didn't see this.
So this thing of assembling at the editing suite, in a way, this is what we always wanted to do. And it's actually there in a lot of our work. It's how to make moving images with and from, and as Fred would say, by way of music. So that the music is not only the subject and the content, It's the guide and the horizon and the substance. It's both the material and the principle of the work. And so the camera is important, but it's in a way,
it's the, yes, the camera takes her at the service of the edit. The edit is really where it's all coming together. That's where we even tried graphing out the takes, like writing them all out, big charts, just so that we could navigate it. OK, so this will go on forever. And I just want to thank the filmmakers. I want to thank Rizvana for the conversation. I want to thank the audience.