The Drone Cinema Film Festival, now in its third year, showcases cutting-edge, minimalist works of ethereal beauty that bring sonic drones into the visual realm. This year’s festival, whose theme is GOLD, takes place again Vrijplaats in Leiden, Netherlands, as well as at the Good Shepherd Center Chapel in Seattle.
Drone Cinema draws its inspiration from a wide range of sources, from the mid-century experimental films of Stan Brakhage and Jordan Belson, the hurdy-gurdy used in Early Music, the tambura of Indian music, to the minimalist drones of La Monte Young and Terry Riley and the recent film genre called Slow Cinema. Drone Cinema filmmakers offer their vision of what sonic drones look like.
Drone Cinema filmmakers transmute sonic drones into moving images. Festival founder Kim Cascone refers to Drone Cinema as “transcendigital” media – media conjured through active imagination instead of being driven by software.” A member of the audience at the first festival in Leiden commented: “Drone cinema is a lot like the visions I have in a flotation tank.”
This year’s entries:
Phillipe Neau Ormophosis
Mike Rooke In Absence of Music Theory
AUME As Above, So Below
Sequencial Haumea
Kat Cascone Thecosomata
Don Haugen The Black It Moves Between Them
Stewart Collinson & Andrea Szigetvári Newton’s Dream
Kris Force Psychomanteum
The evening opens with a live performance by Seattle drone masters: bitės.
Presented by Nonsequitur.