Grant Cutler - Disappearing (2020)

Disappearing was conceptualized while thinking about the mechanics of memory. Composer, and Producer, Grant Cutler was interested in exploring the elastic nature of recollection, how distorted it can become and the looseness of factual recounting over time. For the album, Cutler recorded musicians performing against long delays of themselves, a kind of sonic déja vu where memory and experience blend together in an evolving present.

The second part of the project was to introduce this music to a group of filmmakers, animators, cinematographers, documentarians, and visual artists each of whom picked a track from the set that seemed personally inspiring and used it as a reverse score of sorts with which to create an accompanying short film. Each artist had only two guidelines when making their films: to focus on a moment of simultaneous creation and dissolution, and, to echo the method used in creating the music: include an element of improvisation.

The album along with the short films culminate in a multi-year project which merges music along with the 17 short films into one cinematic experience. The completed film and album are meditative audio/visual explorations of temporal realignment and the dissolution of memory; the constant engagement of reworking the past to establish the present.

Disappearing finds Cutler weaving the present with the past; an effortless sliding from tangent to tangent, a blurry electric cloud brought to focus.