Elori Saxl: Before Blue Video Premiere

528 Hennepin Avenue,Minneapolis MN 55403

01 February, 2021

Description

Elori Saxl: Before Blue video premiere 6pm video premiere on YouTube, 6-8pm projected on Cowles Center for Dance, downtown Minneapolis In partnership with Cowles Center for Dance and Street Factory Media The Great Northern is honored to present the video premiere of the single Before Blue from Minneapolis-born, NYC-based composer Elori Saxl’s upcoming album, choreographed and directed by "beguiling" (New York Times) choreographer Emma Portner and dancer Justin Dejager. An associated interview explores how Saxl’s work contemplates and celebrates the Northwoods, how one particularly challenging winter led to creative breakthroughs, and why “being there” still matters. Both can be viewed on this event page February 1. A large-scale rendering of the video will happen on the exterior of the Cowles Center in downtown Minneapolis. Visitors to that site can stream the music (Before Blue) on their own devices as they take in the projected visuals. Saxl creates music and film projects that explore how technology influences our relationship to land, patterns of communication, and capacity for empathy. Her new album The Blue of Distance (releasing January 22 on Western Vinyl) elegantly combines digitally-processed recordings of wind and water with the rich sounds of analog synthesizers and chamber orchestra. Half-written in the verdant Adirondack mountains of northern New York in a hot summer filled with love, ecstasy, and a feeling of promise, and half-written in the frozen Apostle Islands in Lake Superior in the dead of winter looking back at videos from the summer, The Blue of Distance effortlessly captures the gentle sorrows of nostalgia in an age of perpetual digital memory. About Elori Saxl Minneapolis-born, NYC-based composer Elori Saxl creates music and film projects that explore how technology affects our relationship to land, patterns of communication, and capacity for empathy. Born in 1990 on a generational cusp, Saxl creates work based in the tension between a largely analog childhood and the proliferation of the internet and technology such as Google Maps, Youtube, and smartphones filled with photos and videos that allow us to access distant people and places without being physically present. About The Blue of Distance Combining digitally-processed recordings of wind and water with analog synthesizers and chamber orchestra, Saxl’s album The Blue of Distance (releasing January 22 on Western Vinyl), began as a meditation on the effect of technology on our relationship with land/nature/place but ultimately evolved to be more of a reflection on longing and memory. Half written in the verdant Adirondack mountains of northern New York in a hot summer filled with love, ecstasy, and a feeling of promise, and half written in the frozen Apostle Islands in Lake Superior in the dead of winter looking back at videos from her summer, the album explores the sensation of trying to hold onto something ephemeral even as you feel it slipping away. It investigates questions of reality vs. imagination/ physical vs digital/ and the ways in which memories of landscapes and people shift through both our minds and technology that serves as a proxy for direct contact.