music

An astronaut flees through fields and forests as a city of buildings-turned-rockets shoot into the sky in director Julien Carot sci-fi video for Principles of Geometry’s “Springed Dodge.” “The film creates a parallel between a runaway society seeking salvation, and an astronaut looking for light, having grown estranged from his own world and seeking a state of grace,” explains Carot. Portraying the Earth about to collide into the sun, the film was shot this summer between Paris and Saint Christophe-sur-Avre, Normandy, with shooting held up for days as Carot insisted on waiting for a heat wave and piercing sun overhead to capture the sense of imminent disaster. “It's always a pleasure to see people create their own images from our music,” say band members Guillaume Grosso and Jeremy Duval, who began making music together out of a common interest for VHS jingles and John Carpenter’s science fiction stories. Combining a crisp, quasi-primitive beat with their trademark vintage ambient sound, “Springed Dodge” is taken from the pair’s third album Burn the Land and Boil the Oceans, released on Tigersushi Records in May. “In a way, the circle is complete—as we clearly compose our music with images in our minds.”

Celebrated choreographer Benjamin Millepied, neo-classical composer Nico Muhly and Rodarte designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy converged backstage at Frank Gehry’s iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall last week to put the finishing touches to Moving Parts, their collaboration for the LA Dance Project. Millepied's 27-minute modern ballet is part of a program inaugurating the city’s first major resident dance company in 25 years, which the French-born choreographer set up after relocating from Paris with his wife, Natalie Portman. “The inspiration for the piece came from Christopher Wool's process as a painter, the layering and the way these layers interact in surprising ways,” says Millepied. The show includes a monumental re-staging of Merce Cunningham’s Winterbranch and William Forsythe’s Quintett. “We started with the number of bodies,” LADP co-founder Muhly explains of the inception of Moving Parts. “Six dancers, three musicians.” For the score, Muhly devised a fresh, spare take on Bach to complement the oversized calligraphic printed canvases framing the stage created by New York artist Christopher Wool and the Mulleavy sisters’ sci-fi–leaning, color-coded costumes. “The idea is simple,” Muhly concludes. “A beautiful form with a twist.”