“thanks for checking in” from Gillian Rae Perry and Middle Ear Project’s Music For Your Inbox
This month, Music For Your Inbox released “Checking In” by Gillian Rae Perry, a roughly 14-minute long ‘sound film’ tracing the circuitous path of emotional recovery and reconciliation following a traumatic event; what the trauma is is never divulged, nor is it important that we know what it is – we are dropped in medias res to see someone in the throes of it.
The review of the piece will come later, but why is an online video piece getting a review in an concert review publication? Reticent though you may be, think back to what it was like to see live music in 2020 – faced with an unexpected ban on social gatherings, concert series across the globe struggled to hastily adapt their ways of living to online presentations. Live streamed events (when possible) were fine, but, even when done well, you had the feeling that it wasn’t quite the same (you weren’t hearing the reflections off of the surfaces in a room as you would in a live performance, nor were you getting the pristine and repeatable conditions of a recording studio) . Edited ensemble videos (à la the Whitacre Virtual Choir which had somehow predated the quarantine-style choir videos by 10 years) were more adapted to the medium of video through which we were experiencing new performances of music, but this still felt like an adaptation of the only thing musicians knew how to do; perform.
Music For Your Inbox launched in October 2020 with the idea to offer ‘sound films’ to its patrons once a month, by a different pair of audio and visual artists every iteration. Cassia Streb and Jen Bewerse, themselves performers and composers, began by filming musical performances with its one and only audience in mind – these were not live performances simply caught on film, but performances for the camera, complete with lighting, sets, cinematography, color grading, and most importantly, a deadline for its viewers. You could not simply stash these away in your “to watch” bookmarks folder to languish – they were up for a month on their website, then gone. Pinning these projects to a moment in time, even one as large as 30 days imbues these films with a sense of immediacy and temporality, not unlike a concert. This felt closer to something like Mubi (an arthouse cinema streaming service that, at its inception, offered a film a day for exactly 30 days, after which it would be unavailable to viewers).
MFYI also allows for the difficult-to-define composer’s project, something between music and film, to come to life. Perry’s piece is not quite a music video, and the video is not superfluous to the piece – it and the audio contributes to the whole’s narrative in equal measure. My own project for MYFI co-opts signs from native YouTube-born content to create an “unboxing” video version of Toshi Ichiyanagi’s Music for Electric Metronome – this was a self produced project that benefited from MFYI’s guidance and hosting. A “fake musicology” lecture and “It Allowed them to Produce a Single Sound” are recent favorites, and both are filmed and directed by Jen and Cassia themselves. Through their resources, guidance and often direct involvement with directing / producing the films, Jen and Cassia made a career of helping the between-the-lines projects from slipping through the cracks.
“thanks for checking in” is a lovely piece; the voice memos you hear in the piece “checking in” are dripping with such clear subtext that betrays the truth that their sender has clearly attempted to cull from their response. Combined with an ambient score made of stacked vocals (as Perry is wont to do) and the whole experience gives you the feeling that maybe you should text that friend back. Perry has a knack for writing their relationships into their music in ways that are both personal and universalizing, so that in experiencing their work, you may end up figuring things out about your own relationships.
It’s near the end of July, which means that this film is around for another month (this year they’ve switched to a bi-monthly model), after which another new film will be available for subscribers (from Josh Gerowitz and Louis Lopez). Through exploring the archive you’ll see that many of Los Angeles’s excellent musicians and artists (and me) are well represented as creators or participants throughout MFYI’s nearly 6 years of programming.
Check them out at: