Field Samples, by Luna Galassini

No Name Cinema (video exhibition wall) presents:

Field Samples, by Luna Galassini
(2022 / color / sound / 3 mins)

Opening reception: Friday July 7, 6-8pm
On display during all events or by appointment, July-Sept 2023

This short video documents a series of experiments exploring the audible resonances of reclaimed and abandoned mining sites in New Mexico. The recordings are drawn from solo performances using contact microphones, transducers, and amplifiers, and sound sources including historic field recordings, tuning forks, percussion and voice. The iron gate of a reclaimed mine reverberates like a gong when struck, but it can also become a speaker object, a conduit for microphone feedback, or a source of analog reverb. In 1940, the Albuquerque Civic Symphony staged a concert in the San Pedro Gold Mine; in the 1980s, Pauline Oliveros founded the Deep Listening Band after being invited to record in an underground cistern with a natural 45-second reverb. The fascination with mines and caves as sites of musical experimentation is not new; but these recordings are also an attempt to reimagine these sites of extraction, informed by New Mexico’s unique geological and political histories.

Luna Galassini is a musician and filmmaker. She completed her BA in Music at Bennington College and her MFA in Studio Art at California Institute of the Arts. Her performances and videos are informed by the history and ecology unique to New Mexico. She has built low frequency receivers and candlelight controlled oscillators, performed in decommissioned mining caves, and sung in harmony with surveillance drones. She works as a mushroom cultivator in Santa Fe and lives in the rural village of Truchas.