Double Bills And Buster: Two Nights Of Film And Music by Bill Frisell, Bill Morrison, and Buster Keaton w/ Luke Bergman and Tim Angulo

Night one of this two night installation Double Bills And Buster features The Great Flood, a film by Bill Morrison with music composed and performed live by Bill Frisell with Luke Bergman and Tim Angulo.

The Great Flood is a film-music collaboration by Bill Morrison and Bill Frisell, based on and inspired by the catastrophic Mississippi River Flood of 1927 and the ensuing transformation of American society.

The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in American history. In the spring of 1927, the river broke out of its earthen embankments in 145 places and inundated 27,000 square miles.  Part of its legacy was the forced exodus of displaced sharecroppers, who left plantation life and migrated to Northern cities adapting to an industrial society with its own set of challenges. Musically, the Great Migration fueled the evolution of acoustic blues (including artists who witnessed the flood such as Charley Patton “High Water Everywhere” and Memphis Minnie “When the Levee Breaks”) to electric blues bands that thrived in cities like Memphis, Detroit and Chicago becoming the wellspring for R&B and rock as well as developing jazz styles.rse through a constellation of interior worlds. Sparked by a misunderstanding of the term ‘’psychogeography,” the album inhabits landscapes of consciousness through a collection of synth-saturated, drum-driven, “zone poems.” The album vacillates from meditative to cacophonous, making up a kind of character alignment chart of things light, dark, wholesome, and misanthropic. The sound orbits the phantasmal chill-complexity of previous solo records New Topographics (2020) and Soft Science (2022) while including and responding to several distinguished guests including Chris Ryan Williams (trumpet), Domenica Fossati (flute), Marta Tiesenga (saxophone), and Nyokabi Kariũki (kalimba). Inspired by Italo Calvino’s “Mr. Palomar,” Mark Bradford’s colorfully tattered collages, and maximalist referential streetwear brand “BootBoyz.Biz”, Daydream Observatory assembles a wide array of sonic worlds to present a detailed perspective on the everyday balancing of tragedy and comedy.

On Night 2 (May 25th) of Double Bills And Buster, Roulette presents films by Bill Morrison and Buster Keaton with music composed and performed live by Bill Frisell with Luke Bergman and Tim Angulo.

The Mesmerist (Morrison)
Selected shorts (Morrison)
The High Sign (Keaton)
One Week (Keaton)