Wednesday May 13 | 7:00 PM | Polish Radio Witold Lutosławski Concert Studio
Concert: Joshua Eustis and Kelly Moran, accompanied by the Polish Radio Orchestra, perform 'My Themersons'
Tickets priced at 100 PLN are available at book.mdag.pl.
The Themersons were among the pioneers of the avant-garde who recognised the potential of the close relationship between image and sound in film. Franciszka had a musical education, while Stefan composed and played the piano. He therefore also thought about film form in musical terms, describing film editing as a “temporal collage” – a composition in which individual sequences function in relation to the whole, just as fragments do in a photomontage.
The music of Kelly Moran and Joshua Eustis forms one of the most significant dimensions of the cinematic experience in “My Themersons”. Moran, a New York-based pianist and composer, has spent years developing a musical language centred on the prepared piano, repetition, an ambient atmosphere, and minimalism understood as the art of eliciting emotion from the slightest change. By moving between different musical worlds, her sensibility is unique – she has released music on the iconic Warp label and collaborated with artists such as FKA Twigs, The Avalanches, and Yves Tumour. Her compositions are both austere and sensual, disciplined and deeply moving. In the film, they serve as a source of an inner light that spills across the images.
Joshua Eustis, on the other hand, brings a darker energy, full of underlying tension. As an artist with a background in electronic, ambient and industrial music – having collaborated with Nine Inch Nails and Apparat, among others – and with experience in soundtrack production (his latest being “Marty Supreme”), Eustis crafts music with dramaturgy, orchestral grandeur and cinematic tension. Where Moran leads the viewer towards immersion, Eustis restores resistance. When she reveals fragility, he introduces shadow, structure and unease. As a result of this tension, the soundtrack to “My Themersons” is not a uniform ornament, but a composition of forces – a dialogue between two ways of experiencing the film.
