VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

The Rothko Chapel presents the Summer Music Series. This summer, the Rothko Chapel presents a music series of four programs that recognize the integral role of music to the sacred experience and the history of the Chapel. As an art form, music speaks an international language and has the capacity to bind diverse people together through a shared experience. It can nurture interfaith understanding and has the transformative power to enlighten the mind and spirit. The programs will be held at the Rothko Chapel, 3900 Yupon Street, and are free and open to the public.

Beat Hollow - Brian Siskind, Beatscape Musician
Saturday, July 16, 3pm

Brian Siskind has been producing music stretching the bounds since 1995. His work has been critically acclaimed and widely featured in film, television, and national commercials. His beatscapes have been a mainstay on NPR, and have been sampled and remixed by pioneering artists. Siskind has appeared on labels from Warner Brothers, to acoustic Rounder, the Brooklyn dub of Wordsound, to the illicit Illegal Art. Beat Hollow began in earnest in 2003 in Nashville, Tennessee, where Siskind spent nine years, and since January 2008 he has been based in New York City.

The program will be a guided sonic meditation, acoustically tailored and specifically crafted solely for and in reverence of the sacred space of the Rothko Chapel. Ambient meditative drones, stitched into collage with environmental field recordings and abstract textures form an amalgam of sound that create a singular experience for the listener, toward transcendence.

From documented rituals of Bhutan monks in Brooklyn, to the birds in the ruins of Pompeii, and an alternating portrait of rural and urban life from across the United States and Europe, the resulting sonic images are a portrait of not only Siskind’s perspective, but of the collective auditory experience.