The Bauhaus Festival 2025: Mothlight and the Dance of Afterimages
@Silk Street Music Hall | 23 MAY 2025
Guildhall What’s On
Students from the Guildhall Bauhaus Company present screenings of new audio-visual works inspired by The Bauhaus and Experimental Film, alongside high-energy live performances by Bauhaus Saxophones. Influences this year range from Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch to John Dankworth, Iannis Xenakis and Sun Ra.
My new work, “Mothlight and the Dance of Afterimages” (2025), is an auditory reinterpretation of American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage’s short film “Mothlight” (1963).
Taking inspiration from Xenakis, avant-garde jazz, musical monads, and Ligeti, the composition focuses on textural sounds, complex structures, and dynamic flows of tension and energy. Each sound and instrument behaves organically, interacting, colliding, and continuously evolving without fixed structures. This organic approach includes acoustic instruments as well as electroacoustic elements such as theremin, electronic music, and digitally processed natural sounds. In this piece, sounds are living entities evolving through time, guiding listeners through cycles of emergence, growth, collision, and dissolution, awakening internal memories, subconscious perceptions of mortality, and a unique sense of self.
Original Film By Stan Brakhage
Performed by the Bauhaus Band