Album Notes

The collaborations with Philip Miller over the last six years have provided us both with a series of discoveries and revelations. The relationship of music to the music to the moving image is so powerful and unpredictable that even now after five films it still feels as if we are at the beginning of understanding the process. Yes, of course the music does find an equivalent to the emotional timbre of the drawing, but much more than this it both has to give a narrative thrust to the films and provide a grammar to them. This means fixing a punctuation and establishing relations of cause and effect as well as giving the tempo at which the film reveals itself – so that the unfolding of the film is only possible with a dual absorption of image and sound. And still below this the music has to find a rhythm that addresses the roughness of the crude animation. Sequences which are unwatchable in their jerkiness, can, with the right music be pulled into focus, find a coherence and edge towards meaning. With the music for these films Philip changes the way we see. William Kentridge