“A lyrical, genre-defying feast for the senses… a testament to the twin transcendent powers of music and nature.” – DOC NYC
“Trance-inducing… it does not need a name to exist; it just is.” – Feast of Music
A nearly two-decade effort to transform the ways in which music is created. An unprecedented fusion of piano performance, environment, cinematography, sound recording, and film montage subconsciously initiates the audience into the cabin.
Pianist and Filmmaker James Carson’s feature documentary film, Cabin Music will have its International premiere as part of Unerhört Musikfilmfestival in Hamburg Germany, on Saturday September 9, with James Carson in attendance.
The culmination of a nearly two-decade effort to transform the way in which music is created, the film is a “lyrical, genre-defying feast for the senses… a testament to the twin transcendent powers of music and nature” (DOC NYC) that pulls audiences into Carson’s singular musical vision and its labyrinthian journey. The film was awarded the prize for best editing at the prestigious Salem Doc Fest in March 2023.
Carson’s debut album The Story of Birds, is available through label Bright Shiny Things, and can also found on Apple Music’s New Classical Playlist.
Sitting between the avant-garde stylings of Maya Deren (Meshes of the Afternoon) and the meditative tone poems of Godfrey Reggio (Koyaanisqatsi), Cabin Music weaves a synesthetic aural-visual journey around the world, in which Carson communicates not only through the piano he plays, the clay-walled cabin he builds, and the stunning cinematography he lenses, but also his hypnotic editorial prowess. Interviews – with cabin builders, collaborators, and those James meets in his travels – orient and ground the concrete narrative embedded in the film’s poetry. A technical-artistic tour de force, the picture speaks directly from the subconscious, where piano tone, environment, cinematography, sound recording, and film montage all flow from the same hands, eyes, and heart, allowing the viewer to see and breathe the world as James did on his journey, and as he continues to do in his cabin and in New York to the present day.
Says Carson, “Cabin Music is not only a film, a concert, or an album. It’s the space between all these manifestations. Each gives a different point of access to the same fundamental source. The concerts provide the most intimate connection – a one-to-one communion that cannot be transmitted across any media. The recordings are for repeat listening, however a person chooses to experience them. The film, meanwhile, is designed to do what only film can do: to viscerally bring audiences through time and place in a compressed and expanded way, into the cabin and its origins. Only cinema has the scale and capacity to cross continents and ages in the blink of an eye; only cinema can immerse audiences in the roots from which the cabin is born.”
Cabin Music is Executive Produced by the Emmy award-winning Julian Cautherley (Maya and the Wave, The Crash Reel).
About James Carson
A childhood prodigy born with perfect pitch, Carson composed complete songs at age four and had his music performed by the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra at age sixteen, leading him to be called “one of the most gifted rising stars,” by the Edmonton Journal. When he attended the New England Conservatory, however, his studies with Joe Maneri, Cecil Taylor, and the poet Robert Creeley led him to a dramatic life change: he walked away from music and spent two years backpacking and farming overland from Spain to Japan.
After his return to Northern Alberta, Canada, Carson then spent five years designing and building and practicing in a remote strawbale cabin to practice his music. The musical result was multilayered, detailed, meditative, and harmonious. “I wanted to play the whole piano at once,” says Carson, “in the same way that a single breeze can cause the entire forest to dance and tremble in unison.”
While continuing to return to and practice in the cabin regularly, for the last decade Carson’s attention has since turned to producing and directing Cabin Music, a feature documentary film shot around the world that synthesizes the myriad influences, cultures, and landscapes that his cabin and music draw upon.
Praised by Pulitzer-Prize-winning composer Milton Babbitt, who wrote of his “astonished joy” in response to Carson’s “exceptional pianism”, and by his teacher Robert Creeley, who called him a “genial genius”, Carson has been labeled a “meditative… piano texturalist” (TimeOut New York), who creates “trance-inducing… shimmering arpeggiated figures, played with such speed as to invoke Coltrane-esque ‘sheets of sound’” (Feast of Music), on a “quest to create sounds that reflect the magnificence of nature” (Times of India). Carson creates wholly new music with each performance by removing his own intentions and instead receiving and channeling all forces and energies that are present, both within and beyond the performance space, resulting in “delicate music surrounded by the aura of silence.” (Boston Phoenix). He lives in New York and returns regularly to his cabin.
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