Moods

"Moods" is a video piece by Alan Sondheim. Below is Sondheim's description and text for the piece, dictated in stream-of-consciousness via speech recognition software.

"Azure Carter, voice, songs
Alan Sondheim, Casio Privia PX-160 keyboard

Dictate, I'm used to thinking things through like this. What I
mean is that I think with well it's going to be like this to
have a long text or a short text that will be continuing while
the music is playing so that you will have something to feast
the eye as well as the ear other than the backdrop of the
image against which all of this will be occurring. So this
will be constituting a text accompanying the music or music
accompanying the text the music is for the first time in
several years I will be playing or I have been playing a
keyboard. I've never taken keyboard lessons and I really don't
know how to play a keyboard so I am listening to the intervals
as they come along and I'm using this as a means of
accompanying 4 songs here that all of which were written by
Azure and the words were well the songs were sung by Azure the
words were written by Azure and myself . And then with all of
this going on then I am doing the music and setting up the
situation. So this may be really terrible I don't know. It may
be really awful it may be unconstitutional. It may make no
sense at all. But I wanted to try to work with the Casio
electronic piano to see what I would be able to do with the
music and this piano is so amazing and it's So amazing in its
ability to follow the smallest nuances of what I might be
attempting one way or another period and then I thought I
would place this text against or next to or within the music
itself. This is an attempt to see if I'm capable of even
listening to the music that I'm doing and working with
intervals when I really do not know very well how to use a
keyboard at this point. I know the seascale but a lot of what
I'm playing there is dependent on something entirely
different. In other words you're listening to what I don't
know what I'm doing with music but I do know how to listen and
do the music that I'm trying to do . And that is what you're
listening so it's as if I'm crawling among the debris of music
of the debris of sound and trying to figure out a way to make
everything work together with the beautiful keyboard that
Azure has. So enjoy and I hope you can both listen to the
music and occasionally look up at this writing going across
the screen and make some kind of configuration or figure or
understanding how all of this fits together. Because I'm not
sure it does and I'm not sure my playing is even worth
listening to. The songs are older songs and you will have
heard these many times at least some of them but you haven't
heard me on the keyboard and And it's as if it's as if we're
it's as if we're it's as if we're on the beach and I don't
know really what I'm doing but the waves are coming in and the
waves are sound and the sounds are bodies and the bodies are
half in the water and half out of the water and half swimming
and half an estate of mourning and shock and having a state of
delight and happiness and that's where the bodies are and
that's where the music is and that's where I am and that is
what you're listening to."

-- Alan Sondheim