The Overdub Club is proud to announce the completion of the HD video version of Nightsoil. We have worked long and hard to bring this former performance piece to a place where it can be screened. The premier is slated for Sept 30 at the The Exploratorium in San Francisco.

Nightsoil is a single channel video by filmmakers Thad Povey and Alfonso Alvarez with music by Lucio Menegon, collectively known as The Overdub Club. Derived from a triple projection, live performance piece, Nightsoil utilizes found footage that has been physically reconstituted using hand-processing, tinting, and other hands-on filmic techniques and features a powerful new audio score and soundtrack.

Nightsoil is a layered and evocative display of humanity’s ability to create both beauty and destruction, whose title echoes the archeologist investigating abandoned human latrines. Coming at a dramatic time in America’s history and created in the spirit of this zeitgeist, Nightsoil calls out with an appeal to “think what you’re doing” before choosing violence as a solution to humanity’s problems.

The music for Nightsoil was developed in a series of jam sessions where musicians Lucio Menegon and Mark De Gli Antoni improvised over a series of test reels and live presentations, mixing and matching sounds, manipulating and exploring audio textures – taking ideas from the morphing images and giving ideas back to the film-makers – until a dynamic three section composition coalesced. The move from the live presentation format presented a golden opportunity to re-compose and fully arrange and orchestrate the original score. Along with the musical contributions of John Hanes, Suki O’Kane, Jenya Chernoff, Rebecca Seeman, Jonathan Segel and Laurie Amat, a final soundtrack and score emerged that matches the intensity and emotion of the visuals – at times in syncopation with and at other times cutting against the multiple image presentation.

Strangelet had its first gig last night and we decided to dress up a bit. Jonathan Segel wore a nice steampunk ensemble, Suki O’Kane a santa suit and myself, a gold lame w/ black fringe jumpsuit that Scottie Chapman scored at a clothing swap party last weekend.

‘Case you didn’t know, the Ivy Room has been transformed from the former dive it was. Now it is comfy couches and DJ’s…but on Mondays…wierd gets to take over – and it was cool.

We played a torrid 25 minute set of improv. We were gonna play longer, but it felt over – although we did forget to do the confusing ‘is the set over?’ outro that was planned. Oh well, next time. As is often the case, MZ and Matt Cora recorded it.

The next bunch of players competently jammed around for a bit, sounding like an unorganized Emerson Lake and Palmer meets Bitches Brew era Miles Davis. Their set suddenly took off when this guy came in with a l.e.d. embellished, pedal powered MC bicycle set-up and rapped about being a fool for fuel, pedaling bikes and taking public transit.

Who says experimental can’t be fun, short and sweet?!

Just so you know – A Stranglet is a theoretical particle that could possibly prove to be the realization of the infamous ‘Ice-Nine’ from Kurt Vonnegut’s, Cat’s Cradle. From Wiki:

If the strange matter hypothesis is correct, and a strangelet comes in contact with a lump of ordinary matter such as Earth, it could convert the ordinary matter to strange matter. This “ice-nine” disaster scenario is as follows: one strangelet hits a nucleus, catalyzing its immediate conversion to strange matter. This liberates energy, producing a larger, more stable strangelet, which in turn hits another nucleus, catalyzing its conversion to strange matter. In the end, all the nuclei of all the atoms of Earth are converted, and Earth is reduced to a hot, large lump of strange matter.

Apparently folks are not quite sure whether the giant new Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland will manage to loose a Strangelet (or even a Micro Black Hole) upon us all.