On our July 2014 tour we will be performing live in front of a projection of original footage by Vermont filmmaker John Douglas from his 1971 film GLACIER that tells the journey of three friends hiking on a glacier in the American West.
Douglas describes the film as “a single frame journey, edited in camera. Shot in Glacier National Park, the Grand in the Tetons, and then to the Yukon and into the Kaskawalsh Glacier for 21 days in the last months of summer 1971 with Robert Kramer, Lou Sempliner and myself...”
After seeing the film, we were struck by how well it visually conveyed the mood we try to achieve in our music. Elori thought it would be interesting to try to re-edit the footage into a music video for Alpenglow. To test whether it was worth doing, she started to play the raw footage along with Chapel, our new EP coming out in September. The result was pretty magical. Visual cuts seemed to align perfectly with the music over and over. There were moments when the music and visual went separate ways, but they always weaved back together, interlocking and playing as if they had been made together. The final result of this experiment is two-part. Part one: the music video for “Brothers in Crime,” which is Elori’s re-imagining of the journey and is a mix between new and original edits. Part two, a series of performances around the Northeast during which we perform in front of a projection of the original footage. The synchronization of music and image will be different each night, creating new ways of both seeing the image and hearing the music. The performance is collaboration between two different time periods, two different artists, and two different mediums. The result is a unique experience that changes each night, bringing the audience into the process and taking them along for a journey.
Watch the original film here: GLACIER
