Sander Roscoe Wolff

I was exploring an ancient archive buried deep on an old hard drive and discovered a bunch of music files from 2000, when my friends and I were exploring various ways to support the local music scene. One way we found was to run an automated streaming radio station, which continued for about a year. Here’s what I found:

Some months ago my friend and musical ally Robert Douglas (aka Carl Off) was asked to contribute music to a documentary project about American performance artist Frank Moore. His circumstances wouldn’t allow his participation, so he connected me to the producers, Linda Mac and Mikee LaBash. Carl and I had collaborated, previously, in the improvisational studio and performance duo known as Ain Soph Aur, and he’d tasked me with creating music for From The Heart of Brahma, a film he made about Prumsodun Ok, a queer Cambodian American dancer who’d drawn upon traditional Khmer dance to create new, inclusive, narratives.

The Let Me Be Frank documentary morphed, rather quickly, from a feature film into a series of shorter pieces based on Moore’s book, Art of the Shaman. Since Moore had been born with cerebral palsy, he was unable to speak, so many wonderful fellow artists, collaborators and friends were asked to read sections of the book. My job was to create musical beds beneath these readings. Most ended up being very ambient, though some were more rhythmic.

It has been a really enjoyable and collaborative process.

To watch the episodes (currently 4, so far, with many more planned), visit frankadelic.com or Vimeo. You can also read the text the series is based on, and explore a vast collection of Frank’s other work on eroplay.com.

Here is a playlist of some of the tracks I created for the project:

For those who are interested, here are some very scant production notes about the tracks:

Affected Infected – Voice
A New Free Love – Trombone
A Tribal Body – Cambodian Buddhist Monks, etc
Back Brain – Live Looping Synth & Guitar
Death Tickets – Electric Guitar
Destructive Games – Acoustic Grand Piano
Elementary Acts – Acoustic Guitar
Feedback Cycle – Imagined Psychoactive Ritual
Flesh Pleasure Creatures – Jazz Odyssey
Inside The Ritual – Rock Odyssey
Into The Volcano – Toe Tapper
Jump In – Jazz Odyssey
Magical Action – Recorders, Ocarina, Cat
The Braided Path – Guitar Suite
The End of Evolution – Guitar Suite
The Holy Obvious – Piano
This Hidden Yoke – Trombone
Trance Myths – Kalimba

Listen to the music I created for From The Heart of Brahma: