The piece includes nature and ambient sounds, filtered, modified and re-organized. Those elements are used to build up a short music piece. Sound elements, both natural and derived from the engine or the machinery of a vessel are elaborated, mixed and overlapped several times in order to give birth to an evocative sound landscape. The take-off sound of a seaplane becomes the fundamental note of the last ending chord.
In a certain sense the goal of this short work is to bring forth the voices of the things and their aesthetic value, but not through a documentary approach. The underlying question is:“could the whole world be seen and manipulated as a protean musical instrument?”
Forest by Garth Paine
This musical composition is part of a series of works that Garth Paine describes as "improvised conversations" with nature. In "Forest," Dr. Paine plays a flute that is electronically reprocessed with bird song recorded at Bundanon in Australia and frogs recorded in Arizona in a kind of real-time call and response, an example of what he says is "an ongoing inquiry into the ways in which we converse with nature on a daily basis."
RACING EXTINCTION - Film Preview
Scientists predict that the human footprint on the planet may cause the loss of half of the world’s species by the end of the century. They believe we have entered the sixth major extinction in Earth’s history, following the fifth great extinction which took out the dinosaurs. Our era is called the Anthropocene, or “Age of Man,” because evidence shows that humanity has sparked a cataclysmic change of the world’s natural environment and animal life. Yet, we are the only ones who can stop the change we have created.
The Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS), the group behind the Academy Award®-winning film THE COVE, is back with the new groundbreaking documentary RACING EXTINCTION. Joined by new innovators, OPS brings a voice to the thousands of species teetering on the very edge of life.
This highly charged, impassioned collective of activists is out to expose the two major threats to endangered wild species across the globe. The first comes from the international wildlife trade, and the bogus medicinal cures and tonics that are marketed to the public at the expense of creatures who have survived on this planet for millions of years. The second threat is all around us, hiding in plain sight. It is a hidden world of carbon emissions and acidified oceans that are incompatible with existing animal life. It is a world, revealed with state-of-the-art photographic technology, that oil and gas companies don’t want us to see.
Director Louie Psihoyos has crafted an ambitious mission to clearly and artfully pull into focus our impact on the planet, while inspiring us all to embrace the solutions that will ensure a thriving, biodiverse world for future generations.
At Balance-Unbalance 2015, we are pleased to screen a short preview of RACING EXTINCTION prior to the global release in late 2015. The film’s director, Louie Psihoyos, says “Film can still be the most powerful weapon in the world — a weapon of mass construction. I’m interested in radically changing how people perceive a documentary by making it entertaining and using narrative filmmaking conventions. In our new film, RACING EXTINCTION, we used the highest quality production values and a collective of environmental activists to raise awareness of the issue.”
For information about the campaign against species extinction and to join this global movement please visit: www.racingextinction.com.
