NELS CLINE

"The Reach Of Resonance" began in February 2002 as a documentary on guitarist Nels Cline. Although Nels's life and work exemplifies the kind of lifelong transformative relationship to music explored in the film, a 7-year labyrinth of detours interviewing artists around the world slowly transformed the film's focus, and Nels does not appear in the final version. However, he remains the seed for the entire journey I undertook.

I filmed Nels performing with a wide variety of innovative musicians from 2002 to 2008. The following are a handful of samples:

Nels Cline & Gregg Bendian: https://vimeo.com/25804056
Nels Cline & Bill Frisell: https://vimeo.com/18075481
The Nels Cline Singers + Stained Radiance: https://vimeo.com/16252783
Nels Cline & William Winant: https://vimeo.com/16198436
Nels Cline (Solo): https://vimeo.com/18283429
Nels Cline & Norton Wisdom: https://vimeo.com/19516608
Interview With Norton Wisdom: http://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/The-Fertile-Mistake-An/5210011_fCKtCJ
Nels Cline Website: http://www.nelscline.com

FRED FRITH

While working with Nels Cline in 2002, I began making trips to the San Francisco bay area and Seattle to film Fred Frith. Frith's approach to teaching music by taking musicians' instruments away from them, so that they have to rebuild their understanding of music by first dealing with who they are, and how they communicate and relate to the people around them, became a central underlying idea in the development of "The Reach Of Resonance."

Although my interview with Frith was not included in the final cut of the film, excerpts can be read here: http://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/Freedom-In-Fragments-An/5143571_PjknvC

Between 2002 and 2005, I made numerous trips to New York, Europe, and Canada to film an ever expanding variety of musicians who do not appear in the finished film. An article on my experiences with these musicians will be published in early 2013. In the meantime, an interview in which I talk briefly about these early years of filming, can be read here: http://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/Interviews-Steve-Elkins/19201459_XHGFGr#!i=1497017111&k=b67NRVj

A small handful of additional material from these years has been archived here:
Okkyung Lee: https://vimeo.com/16199332
Zeena Parkins & Ikue Mori: http://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/Phantom-Orchard-An-Interview/5297362_x2zJ38
Elliott Sharp: https://vimeo.com/16523432

PAULINE OLIVEROS AND DAVID COPE

I began filming Pauline Oliveros (in Kingston, New York) and David Cope (in Santa Cruz, California) in 2003 and 2009 respectively. Between the two of them, they have built artificial intelligence that creates new music by dead composers, bounced music off the surface of the moon live during concerts so that it returns to the stage altered by the moon's terrain, and developed software and instruments for children with severe physical and mental handicaps, allowing the world to hear the music inside them for the first time. Although they work independently of each other, the themes of their musical explorations intersect in profound and unexpected ways.

Responding to Ray Kurzweil (futurist and director of engineering at Google), who speculates that in 100 years there will be no clear distinction between humans and computers, and that musicians without musical neural implant technology will be "unable to participate in meaningful dialogue with those who do," Pauline gives a moving and powerful response to the question "What would I want on my musician chip if I were to receive the benefit of neural implant technology," as we already find ourselves in a world where computers predict our musical tastes and compose much of the music that moves us. The interview can be read here: http://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/Steve-Elkins-Interviews/27603429_t7hqDp

JAMES MAGEE

For more than a quarter century, Jim Magee has been building a massive, largely secret, 52,000 square foot "city" made from 2,400 tons of stone (comparable perhaps only to the Egyptian pyramids or temples of Mesoamerica, except made by one person), in the 2,000 acres of empty desert he's acquired outside of El Paso, Texas. Essentially indescribable (the fewer than 100 people who have seen it are usually reduced to stammering awe), it is a kind of dream-fingerprint of his labyrinthine life as a taxi driver in NYC, a legal consultant to the United Nations while living in a junk yard, a caretaker of mentally disabled children, a monastic in France, and an oil rigger in Texas. He is also three artists in one body (one is a woman championed by former first lady Laura Bush), who each have separate studios, professional profiles and careers.

Details of my experience with Jim during production of "The Reach Of Resonance" in 2008 are here: http://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/Steve-Elkins-Interviews-James/27016911_kcmtt7

LEN KAMERLING

In January 2009, during production with composer John Luther Adams in interior Alaska, I was introduced to his close friend Len Kamerling, whose life and work has had a profound impact upon both John and myself. While John has been exploring the Alaskan landscape through its sonic geography, Len had been living in remote Yup'ik eskimo villages exploring the emotional geography native Alaskans have cultivated with the land to survive in such extreme conditions. Len's work provides new depths to John's observation that "we need to know where we are in order to have a more complete understanding of who we are" and my own attempts to better understand how listening creates culture.

A short film I made in tribute to Len, which shows breathtaking footage from his unique ethnographic filmmaking in Yup'ik eskimo villages, Hokkaido, and Tanzania, can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/58239753

In April 2011, I interviewed Kaffe Matthews, who has been creating sonic clothing and furniture (which plays music through your body that your ear can't hear), working with shark scientists in the Galapagos Islands to make music from the abilities of hammerhead sharks to hunt by reading shifts in the magnetic field of the earth, making music with NASA astronauts, melting ice in Quebec, kites flown on an uninhabited Scottish island, and much more. The interview can be read here: http://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/Steve-Elkins-Interviews-Kaffe/27297260_ccgF4s