Frontier is a departure for me in terms of production technique. After creating several rhythmic works (“Barcelona Mosaics”, “Mexico Painting”, “Cicada Songs”, “Time Paintings”) by editing short bits of sound and image together into overlaying musical patterns, I decided to collaborate with two sound artists for “Frontier”. See the full version of "Frontier", below, for the introductory climactic sound composition by Martin Gendelman. This excerpt features audio of 4 sound compositions created by my son, Elliott Grabill that I edited together. The predominant sound work in this excerpt derives from Elliott’s composition for chorus entitled “Hathors”. My intent for “Frontier” was to create a visually-rich abstract environment by blending together a wide assortment of source footage, ranging from natural phenomena (water, sky, etc.), to rapidly-scanned street scenes, to manipulated faces shot off a television screen. Central to the visual field is a slowly moving window frame structure that allows for different visual sequences to be seen together, both inside and outside of the “window” cut outs.
