Liquid Music

Sun Dogs
Composer and Filmmaker Pairings

An ongoing Liquid Music series, Sun Dogs brings together inspired composer and filmmaker pairs to create short-format films with new music for live orchestra (10-15’). Typically, a composer responds to a director’s images/ideas in a film scoring capacity, or a director is given music to respond to for a music video, but we will explore how stories can be told (both musically and visually) from equal footing. An atmospheric phenomenon created by refracted light, a sun dog is striking proof that, when natural conditions are right, familiar elements can shift the way we see the world. The series' prismatic collaborations similarly allow us glimpses at another realm. 

The first three offerings premiered with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in six Music Hall performances October 14-16, conducted by CSO Creative Partner Matthias Pintscher in partnership with the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial.

Program:

Rise, Again by co-composers Daniel Wohl and Arooj Aftab and filmmaker Josephine Decker
On Blue by composer Rafiq Bhatia and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Naked Blue by composer Devonté Hynes and filmmakers Mati Diop and Manon Lutanie

Rise, Again, Naked Blue, and On Blue were commissioned by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and FotoFocus as part of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial: World Record. Support for new arrangements was made possible by Tim Sullivan, Dr. Thomas von Sternberg and Eve Parker.

About the artists

Born in Paris and now residing in Los Angeles, Daniel Wohl is a composer who blends electronics with acoustic instrumentation to often "surprising and provocative effect" (NPR). HIs multifaceted output ranges from intimate music for soloists to immersive electronic pieces, music for film and television, chamber ensembles, and works for large orchestra. He has received critical praise as one of his generation’s "imaginative, skillful creators" (New York Times) making music that is "beautiful...original" (Pitchfork). 

Performances of his electroacoustic concert music have been held at the Broad Museum, MASS MoCA, the Hollywood Bowl, Carnegie Hall, The Barbican, Sadler's Wells, and MoMA PS1, by orchestras such as the Cincinnati Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Alarm Will Sound, The London Contemporary Orchestra, ensembles from the San Francisco Symphony and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and So Percussion among others. An enthusiastic collaborator, Daniel has worked on projects with artists such as Jóhann Jóhannsson, Son Lux, Arooj Aftab, and Laurel Halo. He recently composed the music for the Luna Luna exhibit, a showcase of the world’s first art amusement park, featuring artworks by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Dali, David Hockney, and others.

His passion for composing for film and television has led him to work on a number of media projects with directors such as Luca Guadagnino, Patty Jenkins, Sanaa Lathan, Josephine Decker and Morgan Neville. His most recent album Etat was released on Nonesuch and New Amsterdam Records in 2019. A graduate of the doctoral program at the Yale School of Music, Daniel studied primarily with composer David Lang.

Arooj Aftab is a semi-classical, Hindustani, minimalist composer, songwriter and singer who grew up in Pakistan and is now based in Brooklyn. She was recently awarded the GRAMMY® Award for Best Global Music Performance for her song “Mohabbat” and is the first ever Pakistani artist to receive a GRAMMY® Award. She transforms ancient Urdu poetry and ghazals into genre-defying and contemplative compositions. Her album Vulture Prince was released in April 2021 and has received unprecedented critical acclaim and coverage including Pitchfork Best New Music, TIME Best Songs of 2021 so far, The Guardian Best Albums of 2021 so far, New York Times, BBC Radio 4 Women’s Hour, Uncut, Mojo and lots more. 

A graduate of Berklee College of Music, the composer channels artists from Terry Riley to Abida Parveen, and has played venues from Lincoln Center to (Le) Poisson Rouge to the Museum of Modern Art. In 2020, Aftab composed music for the Academy Award-shortlisted film Bittu and sang on Residente’s Latin GRAMMY® Award-winning single “Antes Que El Mundo Se Acabe.” On Vulture Prince, she is backed by an all-star cast, including Badi Assad, Maeve Gilchrist, Jamey Haddad, Kenji Herbert, Shazhad Ismaily, Juliette Jones, Petros Klampanis, Nadje Noordhuis, Gyan Riley, and Darian Donovan Thomas.

Josephine Decker is a filmmaker and performer whose work focuses on women’s interiority and sexuality. Her feature film Shirley, starring Elisabeth Moss and Odessa Young, won Sundance 2020’s U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Auteur Filmmaking and centers around two women whose subtly erotic friendship is both liberating and destructive. Josephine’s work tends to bend the space between imagination and reality. Her feature film Madeline’s Madeline follows an unstable teenager as she is seduced into a large role in a theater company. The film’s visceral cinematography, editing and sound design thrust the audience into the ever-shifting first-person perspective of her main character Madeline. Madeline’s Madeline, scripted through a devised process with ten actors, played Sundance, Berlinale and scores of festivals worldwide, was hailed as a “mind-scrambling masterpiece” (Indiewire) and was nominated for Best Picture at IFP’s Gotham Awards and for two Independent Spirit Awards. 

Said to be ushering in a “new grammar of narrative” by The New Yorker, Josephine premiered her first two narrative features at the Berlinale Forum 2014 to critical acclaim. 

Her film The Sky is Everywhere (A24/Apple, adapted from Jandy Nelson’s YA novel) was named a New York Times Critic’s Pick. Josephine also explores collaborative storytelling via TV directing, documentary making, performance art, accordion-playing, acting, teaching at places like CalArts and Princeton University and working with The School of Making Thinking. In the wake of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, Josephine is directing and producing a feature documentary about teen mothers in Dallas, Texas, her hometown.  She is also writing feature screenplays, raising her two toddlers and limiting her personal water usage. She is honored to be a part of this dynamic group and would love to collaborate with you!

The New York Times proclaims guitarist, composer, and producer “Rafiq Bhatia is writing his own musical language,” heralding him as “one of the most intriguing figures in music today.” A guitarist, composer, producer, and sound artist “who refuses to be pinned to one genre, culture or instrument,” Bhatia “treats his guitar, synthesizers, drum machines and electronic effects as architectural elements,” the Times writes. “Sound becomes contour; music becomes something to step into rather than merely follow.”

Bhatia’s 2018 album Breaking English finds a visceral common ground between ecstatic avant-jazz, mournful soul, tangled strings and building-shaking electronics, resulting in a "stunningly focused new sound" (Chicago Tribune) that resembles “science fiction on a blockbuster scale” (Washington Post). 2020’s Standards Vol. 1 (EP) renders repertoire from the American songbook “completely deconstructed, infused with brand new textures and electronic effects, dreamlike and beautiful” (BBC).

More recently, the painstaking sound design of Bhatia’s own projects has inspired other artists to recruit him as a producer and mixing engineer. 2020 saw the release of pianist Chris Pattishall’s debut album, Zodiac, featuring the music of Mary Lou Williams with production and mixing by Bhatia. The New York Times hailed it as “a startling achievement,” while The Wire writes, “the production successfully achieves an impression of solid forms melting and reconfiguring, ethereal transitions precipitating dramatic and frequent shifts of mood and manner… an audible space opening up between the routine and the magical.”

Since 2014, Bhatia has been a member of the band Son Lux. Together, they have released three albums and numerous EPs, and given over 500 performances worldwide. Most recently, they scored the Academy Award-winning film Everything Everywhere All At Once for A24 which was nominated for Best Original Score at the Oscars and BAFTAs, and included collaborations with David Byrne, Mitski, Moses Sumney, Randy Newman, and more. 

Bhatia has presented his music live in dozens of performances across three continents. He has been commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, Cincinnati Symphony, Walker Art Center, Liquid Music, Newfields, The Jazz Gallery, Toledo Museum of Art, and more. Bhatia has collaborated with Arooj Aftab, Michael Cina, Dave Douglas, Vijay Iyer, Okkyung Lee, Billy Hart, Helado Negro, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Moses Sumney and many others.

Bhatia is a Jerome Foundation Composer/Sound Artist Fellow and adjunct faculty of the New School’s Performer-Composer Master of Music program. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is recognised as one of the most original voices in contemporary cinema. His previous seven feature films, short films, installations and his recent live performance have won him widespread international recognition and numerous awards, including the Cannes Jury Prize in 2021 for Memoria, his first film shot outside of Thailand, featuring Tilda Swinton. He also won Cannes Palme d’Or in 2010 with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. His Tropical Malady won the Cannes Competition Jury Prize in 2004 and Blissfully Yours won the Cannes Un Certain Regard Award in 2002. Syndromes and a Century (2006) was recognised as one of the best films of the last decade in several 2010 polls. Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), his first feature, has been restored by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation.

Born in Bangkok, Apichatpong grew up in Khon Kaen in north-eastern Thailand. He began making films and video shorts in 1994 and completed his first feature in 2000. He has also mounted exhibitions and installations in many countries since 1998 and is now recognised as a major international visual artist. 

His art prizes include the Sharjah Biennial Prize (2013) the prestigious Yanghyun Art Prize (2014) in South Korea and the Artes Mundi Award (2019). Lyrical and often fascinatingly mysterious, his film works are non-linear, dealing with memory and in subtle ways invoking personal politics and social issues. Working independently of the Thai commercial film industry, he devotes himself to promoting experimental and independent filmmaking through his company Kick the Machine Films, founded in 1999, which also produces all his films. His installations have included the multi-screen project Primitive (2009), acquired for major museum collections (including Tate Modern and Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris), a major installation for the 2012 Kassel Documenta and most recently the film installations Fireworks (Archive) (2014), Invisibility (2016), Constellations (2018), A Minor History (2021, 2022), and Moving Pictures (2023). Apichatpong lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand. 

Raised in England, Devonté Hynes started in the punk band Test Icicles before releasing two orchestral acoustic pop records as Lightspeed Champion. Since 2011, Hynes has released four solo albums under the name Blood Orange –Coastal Grooves, Cupid Deluxe, Freetown Sound, and Negro Swan, as well as 2019’s Angel’s Pulse mixtape; all of which have been critically acclaimed. His songs and albums have explored the complexities and ambiguities of 21st century identity, delving into memory, trauma, depression and anxiety, as well as the triumphs of vulnerable communities, including people of color and queer and trans communities, and where they intersect. 

In addition to his solo work, Hynes has collaborated with pop music superstars including Mariah Carey, A$AP Rocky, Solange, P. Diddy, and many others. He is also an accomplished film composer, with credits including the scores for Melina Matsoukas’ Queen and Slim, Luca Guadagnino’s We Are Who We Are, and Rebecca Hall’s Passing.

In 2018 Hynes was one of four pianists invited to play alongside Philip Glass at the Kennedy Center, and in 2020 was nominated for a Grammy in the category of Best Chamber Music or Small Ensemble Performance for his work with Third Coast Percussion on their album Fields. His debut Concerto for piano and strings, Happenings, premiered at New York’s Little Island Festival in 2021.

Mati Diop lives and works between France and Senegal. Her debut feature film Atlantics won the Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival in 2019 (where Mati was also a jury member in 2021 along side Spike Lee) and was shortlisted for Best International Film at the Oscars 2020. Her short films, In my room (2020), One thousand suns (2014), Liberian Boy (2015), Big in Vietnam (2011), Snow Canon (2010) and Atlantics (2009) have been screened and awarded at many film festivals including Venice, Toronto, Rotterdam, Viennale, Indie Lisboa, FID Marseille and also MOMA. Mati was awarded Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Emerging Artist Award in 2016. As an actress, Mati Diop made her debut in Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum (2008), and has since appeared in Simon Killer by Antonio Campos (2012), Fort Buchanan by Benjamin Crotty (2014), and Hermia & Helena by Matias Piñeiro (2016).

Manon Lutanie is a publisher and filmmaker based in Paris. Her short films have screened internationally at FIDMarseille, Indie Lisboa, e-flux, FIAC Hors les murs, ICA London, Documenta Madrid, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Mucem, and elsewhere. In 2009, she founded the independent publishing house Editions Lutanie (editionslutanie.fr/_en/), through which she has published several books and carried out numerous projects with artists such as Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Gordon Matta-Clark, Marianne Vitale, Faye Wei Wei, and Rene Ricard. She is a member of P.A.I.N.–a non-profit acting to end the overdose epidemic and the stigma of addiction.