David Shea - The Art of Memory (2021)

Film Series #2 – The Art of Memory
This series of pieces originally released in 2006 on my Metta Editions label came from the period of 2004 – 2006. Some of the pieces were commissioned by the Rotterdam Film Festival for a unique project. As so much of my work and sampled electronic pieces had been influenced by film music and cinema, the idea of the director Edwin Carels was to commission five film makers working in different genres of cinema to make a short film based on my music. I gave each filmmaker 3 pieces separately and layered into a single piece, so they could choose the composite or any of the three layers to base their film on.

This Premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2005 and generated some very interesting films in an almost reverse film track to my soundtrack without a film, flipping the film first, soundtrack second methodology.

The pieces are all inspired in some way by films and in particular the great experimental filmmaker Arthur Lipsett. They are however not soundtracks to existing films. My interest was to generate soundtracks without films and often I have performed these works live with video works based on my music.


Here are the original notes from The Art of Memory:

The Art of Memory is based on the book by Francis Yates of the same name which chronicles and explores the history of memory techniques from the ancient Greeks and Romans through the late renaissance and early scientific revolutions and explores the technical to the most mystical connections between memory and mnemonic systems.

Each piece was composed and constructed from acoustic scored and improvised works, samples from films and records and many of the computer programs I had worked on during my time at IRCAM in Paris from 2002 – 2004. This return to sampling after years of concentrating on scored acoustic works also coincided with a move to Australia and a focus on the Pacific Asian region. Each piece deals with elements of memory and conditioning through the use of sound icons, musical styles, field recordings, film archive sources and recordings I had used for other CD’s and in other contexts.

The sections which use live musicians were constructed from the classical ensembles I had worked with while living in Brussels and the recordings I made leading to the Classical Works and Classical Works 2 CD’s on the Tzadik Label, combined with samples found in Europe and Australia with a healthy dose of electronic manipulation and sampled recomposing techniques.

This collection of works is directly related to my search into the use of sampling and sampler composition as a type of ‘memory theatre’ based on the book That Art of Memory, an influential book that helped lead to my approach to constructed sampled compositions and performances with a physical sampler. For more info see my written articles Memory Fragments, Giacinto Scelsi – The Counterpoint of a Single Note, Writings on Memory and The Music of The Art of Memory