Visions of Doing

That fall we drove from Lyon to the Netherlands for some concerts. Bruno Meillier, who was playing saxophone with me and the mechanical band, made good friends in Leeuwarden and stayed there while I headed to Arnhem for the AVE Audio Visual Experimental Festival. When I arrived I was led to a big empty flat where some fifteen artists were accommodated. The student who was taking care of us was Karel Doing, though I didn’t know his full name until we met again later at Dodorama in Rotterdam, at a Fred Frith concert. On our second meeting I told Karel that my next project was going to have a home made one-hour long Super 8 sound film backing the live performance. Not without naivety I ignored Karel’s skeptical reaction. The next moment I was visiting Studio Ten, a unique place for shooting and editing and processing and blowing up Super 8 and 16mm films. Karel had just created Studio Ten after a long period collecting the best machines: beautiful Chinon cameras, great Eumig projectors that you can slow down to three frames per second, and huge systems for editing and post-synchronizing. There we started working together on our first performance, Rotary Factory, which was going to premiere at The International Symposium of Shadows in London. Now twenty years after our first encounter I am paying homage to Karel doing’s images by putting together a selection of music pieces I composed beside him. More than just the soundtracks to his films, these pieces are the result of years of collaboration, in the recording studio and in live performances. Tracks like « Visions of Shanghai », « Energy Energy » and « Turkish Boys at the Harbour » have Karel’s sounds integrated within the compositions. Others like « Bubblin' » and « The Thermodynamic Orchestra » inspired Karel’s development of several of his Optical Toys. As we worked together at Studio Ten on three performances (Recollection, Four Eyes and Rotary Factory) and a CD-ROM (Nine Optical Toys) we developed a strong complementary style evident in the music I composed for Karel’s films: Energy Energy, I mages of a Moving City, East, and Getijden. The extract of Four Eyes included here* shows how our images and sounds criss-cross, resulting in a collective piece. Pierre Bastien, 2008 *watch the entire film on vimeo.com/64879804