Thomas Ferrella
Saxophonist Ed Ahrens plays against a backdrop of projected images.
As winter winds down, music fans look forward to hearing live music outdoors under the stars. But before the weather cooperates, local musicians and video artists will deliver a performance under a planetarium dome, with stars replaced by mind-expanding abstractions.
MindStorm, a “film created in real time,” will be performed at the Madison Metropolitan School District Planetarium March 6-7. The central collaborators are musician and artist Thomas Ferrella, and live cinema filmmaker Aaron Granat.
Live music accompanied by live-mixed images or projection performances has a long history as musicians and filmmakers have pursued multisensory projects. Ferrella cites the direct influence of Sun Ra Arkestra trumpeter Kelan Phil Cohran (1927-2017), who presented African Skies at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium in 1993. Inspired by Cohran, Ferrella reached out to Geoff Holt, director of the Madison school district planetarium, who encouraged Ferrella to utilize the special features of the room. “Geoff projected mandala images from my website on the dome, and I was blown away,” Ferrella recalled, “I thought we’d play under stars. But we can do this.”
For 20 years, Ferrella, a retired physician, has been working with keyboardist Kevin Schaefer in a band-with-no-name that focuses on “making sounds happen, and improvisational soundscapes.” Over the same period, Ferrella has been filming studies of motion in nature. “Spiders on water, billowing clouds, smoke rising from smokestacks — anywhere I go, I travel with a video camera,” he says. MindStorm will fuse these two endeavors as Ferrella and his colleagues create a soundscape and Granat live-mixes the motion studies into a dense collage on the planetarium dome.
“I honestly had no idea that Aaron was going to take the videos in the direction that he’s taking them,” Ferrella says, “and that has been a real eye opener.” Granat uses VJ mixing software used more typically in a dance club setting, but as a graduate student and instructor of film production at UW-Madison, he’s well aware of the experimental tradition he’s working in.
“I’ve been trying to build a practice of making video compositions with that same sense of immediacy that music has, and I can feel the energy of the audience and feed off of it,” Granat says. “This was an opportunity to push that even further in an immersive environment.”
MindStorm plays at the MMSD Planetarium, 201 S. Gammon Road, March 6-7, 8 p.m
