Castro Street One (2013)

This is a beautiful film shot by Bruce Baillie in 1966. Unfortunately the sound track left something to be desired, so I decided to do my own. It is dedicated to the late Stephen McMahan, sound designer extraordinaire; I used many of his sounds. Also thanks to Simon Stockhausen, Chris Watson and the gents at Sonic Couture, Stephen Howell, Sonokinetics, Soundiron and Joe Trupiano for their fabulous libraries! By the way, it has nothing to do with San Francisco’s Castro Street. The location is actually a different Castro Street, across the bay in Richmond, in a huge Southern Pacific railroad yard. The voices are, first, English comedian Reginald Gardner from 1936, and second, the American comic Shorty Petterstein from 1957.

Agonushka in the Desert (2013)

Something new for me. The music by Stravinsky, performed in-studio and “noodled” live at intermissions in orchestra pits, combining with the winds through power lines crossing a windswept desert, playing…well…sometimes Stravinsky again… Many thanks to Simon Stockhausen, a master of sampling and electronic synthesizers, who has taken the contributions of his father, seminal avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, to the cutting edge, and just keeps raising the bar! His soundsets for the softsynths Alchemy and Iris are fantastic, as is Geosonic, a library of natural sounds transmuted into hitherto-unimagined forms.

Agonushka in the Desert (2013)