The flute makes me mute, its round
holes, sound of morning that’s
coming.
— Maggie Nelson, The Last Winter
Eli Keszler is a percussionist and sound design artist who makes sparse, meandering, conceptual music. Here, we have a newly released video for “Lotus Awnings,” a song from his upcoming album Stadium, which is out October 12 on Shelter Press.
Filmmaker Alan Segal shot and directed the video, which makes use of unremarkable urban landscapes (brick buildings, sidewalks, etc.) to create a stillness that matches the meditative temper of the audio. The shots are temporally ambiguous, which is to say the lighting is bluish gray, not-quite-bright, but not-quite-dark, which makes me think of morning more than evening. Paired with Keszler’s song, Segal’s video imparts an overwhelming sense of stillness, a sense of beginning.
What is morning if not stillness? Morning time, paradoxically, isn’t a time, more of a mood, less a proper designation than a measure of disposition. It’s when things haven’t begun — the shifting tide between asleep and awake, a time outside of time. As I listened to the flute pattern throughout, I couldn’t help but think: sound of morning that’s coming.
Not insignificantly, the video begins with a white letter “A” in one corner, from which a slow-moving line emerges. The line crawls across the screen for five minutes and eventually lands on a “B” toward the end. And the video is interspersed with red abstractions, specked with white dots, a void that’s not quite a void, almost dreamlike. Morning feels like that too: thinking about how to get from point A to point B in the midst of half-dreaming. Not awake, not asleep.
Lose yourself in the video and the song, maybe feel its morning-ness and its stillness.
More about: Eli Keszler
