Colliding Lines announce ‘Home Tapes Vol. 1’ – a lockdown compilation July 15, 2020

As the first wave of lockdown lifted and we began to look back at months spent indoors, Colliding Lines gathered recordings from a dozen artists who had been making work at kitchen tables, in bedroom studios, and on borrowed four-tracks. The result is Home Tapes Vol. 1, a cassette and digital compilation released on 15 July 2020. Each contributor was asked to submit a piece made entirely at home during the spring of 2020, using whatever instruments, found sounds, or field recordings they had to hand. The brief was deliberately open: some tracks are songs, some are sound poems, some are simply the hum of a room given shape.

The compilation features new work from Derek Yau, whose piano figures are processed into soft, worn loops; from Mouth’s Theresa Elflein, who contributes a solo vocal-and-tape piece recorded in her Berlin flat; and from a number of artists appearing on Colliding Lines for the first time, including Leeds-based cellist Emma Johnson and sound artist Noor Mousa. In keeping with the project’s domestic origins, all proceeds from the digital edition go to the Trussell Trust, supporting food banks across the UK. The cassette edition, limited to 100 copies, comes with a hand-stamped sleeve and a fold-out insert of notes written by each artist about the room they recorded in.

Home Tapes Vol. 1 is available now on our online store, and a selection of the tracks will be broadcast as part of a special radio hour on Resonance FM later this month. We hope the collection serves as a record of what it meant to make art in a year when the world stayed still.

Reanimation moves online with ‘Living Room Scores’ August 5, 2020

When live events were put on hold, the Reanimation series – our ongoing project pairing live film scores with new and restored cinema – had to find a new home. Rather than postponing, we took the series to the only rooms available: the living rooms of artists and audience members alike. On 5 August 2020, Reanimation presented Living Room Scores, a one-night online event streamed live from four different homes across London. Each artist performed a brand-new score to a short film, with the whole evening broadcast in real time from a central mixing desk run by our own technicians at a socially distanced New River Studios.

The programme opened with a re-score of Maya Deren’s 1943 short Meshes of the Afternoon by cellist and electronic musician Flora Yin-Wong, whose looped harmonics and bowed metal gave the dreamlike images an unsettling, liquid quality. That was followed by a new score for Len Lye’s A Colour Box from sound artist Graham Dunning, who built a mechanical turntable instrument live on camera. The night closed with a trio performance from Colliding Lines regulars Tom Mudd, Lia Mazzari, and Derek Yau, improvising together remotely to a restored print of Man Ray’s L’Étoile de mer. Audience members were invited to dim the lights, turn up the volume, and watch the stream as if it were a cinema screen in their own front room.

The full video of Living Room Scores is available to watch back on our Vimeo channel, and we are already planning a second online edition for November. If you would like to be considered as a performer or suggest a film for scoring, please write to us through the contact page.

Theresa Elflein releases solo EP ‘Maps to the Interior’ September 10, 2020

Theresa Elflein, known to many as the voice and guitar behind Mouth, has released her first solo EP under her own name. Maps to the Interior is a collection of five songs written and recorded between Berlin and London over the last two years, and it arrives on 10 September 2020 via Colliding Lines. Where Mouth’s work is often full-band and extroverted, these solo pieces are close-mic’d and intimate, built around fingerpicked acoustic guitar, whispered vocals, and occasional layers of tape hiss and distant field recordings. The songs were recorded in one take on a portable four-track, with no edits or overdubs, giving the EP the feel of a private session overheard rather than performed.

Opening track ‘The Last Room’ sets the tone: a slow, minor-key waltz about leaving a city you once called home. From there, the EP moves through the breathy, half-spoken ‘Museum of Small Things’ and the almost instrumental ‘Halensee’, which pairs a single repeated guitar figure with the sound of a Berlin S-Bahn passing in the distance. Closer ‘Maps to the Interior’ is the longest track on the record, building from a quiet hum to a rare moment of full-throated singing before falling back into silence. Elflein has said the EP is “a series of postcards from the in-between places – train stations, rented rooms, the hour before sleep.”

Maps to the Interior is available digitally and as a limited CD in a recycled paper sleeve, hand-numbered. A launch performance, recorded live at home, will be shared on our video channel later in September. You can pre-order the EP now from our online store.

Colliding Lines and A—Z presents ‘Sound & Vision’ zine October 20, 2020

We are proud to announce the publication of Sound & Vision, a new zine co-published by Colliding Lines and independent arts press A—Z. The zine brings together short essays, interviews, and visual scores from artists working at the meeting point of music and moving image – the same territory that the Reanimation series has explored over the past three years. Edited by Colliding Lines co-founder Lia Mazzari and A—Z publisher Sam Riviere, Sound & Vision runs to 64 pages and is printed risograph in two colours, with a screenprinted cover designed by artist and musician Takako Saito.

Inside, readers will find a long conversation between Derek Yau and experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers about scoring for grain and light; a series of drawn “listening scores” by visual artist and composer Heather Leigh; an essay by Mouth’s Theresa Elflein on the relationship between lyric writing and the body; and a pull-out poster featuring a timeline of live film scoring in London from the 1960s to the present day. There is also a printed flexi-disc bound into the spine, containing a previously unreleased collaborative track by Flora Yin-Wong and Graham Dunning recorded during the Living Room Scores online event in August.

Sound & Vision is available to order from our shop, and a launch event featuring readings, a short screening, and a live flexi-disc playback will be announced soon. As with all our publications, the zine is designed to be affordable and accessible: priced at £10, with a limited edition of 50 copies that include an original hand-drawn page from one of the artists.