Sound Speed Marker by Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler was comprised of three video installations and related photographs, covering a span of five years of work which explore film’s relationship to place and the traces that movie making leaves behind. The exhibition included the premiere of Giant (2014), a work commissioned by Ballroom Marfa. The exhibition was on view at Ballroom until August 10, 2014 and was accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue. Sound Speed Marker traveled to the Irish Museum of Modern Art in December 2014 and the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston in May 2015.

Notable works from the exhibition include:

Grand Paris Texas (2009) considers the physical and social space of a dead movie theater, a forgotten song and the inhabitants of a small town. The Grand Theater, an abandoned, pigeon-filled movie theater in downtown Paris, serves as the protagonist in a narrative that explores Paris as a meta-location constructed through celluloid and soundtrack. Grand Paris Texas connects three seminal movies of the Southwest: Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984), Bruce Beresford’s Tender Mercies (1983), and King Baggot’s classic silent film, Tumbleweeds (1925).

In Movie Mountain (Méliès) (2011), Hubbard/Birchler explore the site of a mountain in the Chihuahuan Desert near the town of Sierra Blanca. The project generates several narrative strands that interweave memory and forgetting. Movie Mountain (Méliès) features a script-writing cowboy as well as local residents whose relatives performed in an original silent picture filmed at the mountain. 

Giant (2014) interweaves signs of life and vistas of a decaying movie set built outside of Marfa: the Reata mansion from the 1956 Warner Bros. film, Giant starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean. After filming was completed the three-sided facade was left behind in the landscape. Hubbard/Birchler explore the skeletal remains of the set as seasons change, day turns to night and parts of the structure swing and fall off. Scenes of a film crew recording the current conditions are juxtaposed with a Warner Bros. office in 1955, where a secretary types up the location contract for the motion picture that has yet to be created.

For our fifth annual New Year’s film program, Ballroom Marfa hosted a film screening of Philippe Garrel’s 1968 film Le Révélateur, with a live score by Philadelphia harpist Mary Lattimore and synth player Jeff Zeigler at the Crowley Theater.

Mary Lattimore is a classically trained harpist, whose collaborations have seen her working with such esteemed luminaries as Kurt Vile, Meg Baird, Thurston Moore, Ed Askew, Fursaxa, Jarvis Cocker and the Valerie Project. On her debut record, The Withdrawing Room, she found a worthy sideman in Philadelphia’s Jeff Zeigler, whose contemplative Korg echoes & holds a mood for Mary’s runs.

Zeigler has amassed quite the resume in recent years, between his space-rock outfit Arc in Round and his production work for local luminaries Kurt Vile, Purling Hiss and The War on Drugs. Zeigler’s also been expanding into the solo / collaborative experimental zone, playing solo shows with Lattimore and opening for English ambient artist Benoît Pioulard.

Ballroom and Marfa Book Co. welcomed Julianna Barwick for a special performance in Ballroom’s galleries. 

Louisiana-born/Brooklyn-based Barwick performed from many of her recent releases: Florine, her EP from 2010, opens with a song Pitchfork describes as a “halogen hymn.” Producer Diplo, announcing his contribution to her 2011 Matrimony Remixes EP, introduced her music to his followers as the sound of “Care Bears making love.” Dolphins, angels and cathedrals are reference points used to describe the sounds she makes, compositions often characterized by reverberating vocal loops with minimal instrumental accompaniment.

Barwick’s breakthrough came with the 2011 album The Magic Place, its title is a reference to a beloved tree on the farm where she was raised, and also to the fruitful year when it was recorded. In addition, she produced a remix for Radiohead, an improvisational album with composer Ikue Mori, and recorded her 2013 album Nepenthe in Iceland at Sigur Rós’ studio and with contributions from the Amiina post-rock string quartet.

In keeping with the 2013 visual arts exhibition Quiet Earth‘s ongoing examination of humanity and its place amid the changing volumes of planet Earth, Ballroom Marfa presented C. Spencer Yeh’s improvisations on violin, voice, and electronics. Yeh joined by Messages, the duo Taketo Shimada & Tres Warren, for a performance on November 21, 2013.

Spencer Yeh was born in Taipei, Taiwan and now lives in Brooklyn. Yeh’s work emerges initially from an improvisational practice, having developed a distinct musical vocabulary with violin, voice, and electronics. As a composer Yeh expands his approach, often employing video and other mediums to integrate visual and aural experience while investigating the role of the gesture. Yeh has performed and presented work in a variety of venues internationally, including the New Museum, New York; the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Issue Project Room, Brooklyn; Roulette, Brooklyn; ICA, Philadelphia; ICA, London; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; Performa; Lampo; Sónar; Frieze Music; and All Tomorrow’s Parties. He has collaborated with a variety of artists such as Nate Wooley, Okkyung Lee, Tony Conrad, and New Humans with Vito Acconci. Yeh is also a trailer editor and programmer at Spectacle Theater, Brooklyn.

Messages is the New York duo of Taketo Shimada & Tres Warren. Mirage is the third full-length release by Messages, recorded in 2008 before their first two albums and has remained unreleased until now. This record documents the duo’s earliest long-form drone explorations and intonations, most of which were recorded during long sessions in Tres’ basement bunker in the East Village. Mixing orbits of homemade acoustic instruments, electric drones & percussion, Mirage is a humid transmission sent straight from the womb.

Commissioned by Ballroom Marfa, The Country and Western Big Band Suite was the first installment of The Marfa Triptych, three portraits of West Texas envisioned by Graham Reynolds. The project was an instrumental suite for 14 players, described by Reynolds as “classic instrumental country meets Western soundtrack meets power jazz rhythm section.” The project culminated in a live performance at the Crowley Theater in 2014 and a full-length album released in November of 2019.

The album features legendary country guitarist Reid Volkaert (Merle Haggard), the celestial pedal steel of Ricky Davis (Dale Watson), and adventurous contemporary string quartet Invoke, all alongside a horn and rhythm section comprised of several of Reynolds’ longtime cohorts. The opening track “Good Morning, Marfa” evokes the warmth of the sun emerging over the peaks of the Davis Mountains and introduces one of the album’s central musical themes. The up-tempo train anthem of “Union Pacific” pairs nicely with the rollicking ranch and cattle themed “Stampede.” “Highway 67” conveys the majestic and ethereal dip south from interstate 10 just past Fort Stockton, which geographically continues on to the Mexican bordertown of “Ojinaga.” Dazzling and virtuosic guitar work courtesy of Redd Volkaert is highlighted on “Redd Redd Redd” and “Goat Herd.” The string quartet “Runaway” builds on the earlier ride on the rails, while “The Uninhabited” mixes western soundtrack with the often-overlooked keyboard sorcery of Graham Reynolds; a meditation on the vast and rugged West Texas landscape that is also apparent on “The Chihuahuan Desert.”

The project was inspired by Reynolds’ trips from his base in Austin, Texas to the high desert grasslands of Far West Texas. His approach combines local musical traditions – from cowboy songs and Southern jazz to the norteño music of Northern Mexico – with a personal perspective that comes from years of scoring film, theater and modern dance performances.

Reynolds spent a significant amount of time working with Ballroom Marfa to coordinate research trips throughout the region. His itinerary included visits with musicians, historians, storytellers, artists and local legends from Terlingua, Alpine, Presidio, Shafter, Fort Davis, Valentine, Marfa and other far-flung locales in the Big Bend region.

The Marfa Triptych is three portraits of West Texas as envisioned by Austin-based composer Graham Reynolds.

The multimedia, genre-hopping trilogy of performances is inspired by Reynolds’ interest in the intermingled populations of the Texas-Mexico border regions, from ejido to ranch to the visual arts community. The three performances will take place annually, starting in late 2013.

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Ballroom presented Laura Marling at the Highland Annex for an intimate encounter with a rising star. Willy Mason opened. Marling’s music belongs to the traditions of both British and American folk music. Her fourth album, Once I Was An Eagle, was nominated for the UK’s prestigious Mercury Prize.

Marling’s musical background is well-documented: Her father taught her guitar at a young age, and her early work references English pastoral folk artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s like Pentangle, Fairport Convention or Nick Drake. In 2008 at the age of 18 she released her first album Alas I Cannot Swim, which was quickly recognized as a landmark document of the aforementioned scene. Two more records followed in 2010 and 2011. In the years since her debut her achievements also include the 2011 Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist, two Mercury Music Prize nominations and the NME Award for Best Solo Artist.

Though her work is lumped in with folk revivalists Mumford & Sons and Noah and the Whale — two groups with whom she was entangled professionally and socially — Marling’s music stands out for the ways in which it breaks with those traditions. She incorporates an adventurous sonic palette that feels more aligned with the experimental impulses of Sandy Denny, Bert Jansch and Richard Thompson or even to Bob Dylan and Laurel Canyon-era Joni Mitchell, while other critics hear the expansive psychedelia found in Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd’s mellower fare. 

As part of the 2013 Marfa Dialogues program in New York City, Ballroom Marfa presented the exhibition Quiet Earth at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s Project Space. Curated by Fairfax Dorn, the exhibition engaged current environmental issues, particularly climate change, and included environmentally-engaged artwork from the 1970s to the present. Featured artists included Amy Balkin, Larry Bamburg, Agnes Denes, Hans Haacke, Donald Judd, Maya Lin, Trevor Paglen, and Robert Rauschenberg. 

Marfa Dialogues was conceived in 2010 by Ballroom and the Public Concern Foundation with the aim of bringing together artists, scientists, writers, and critical thinkers to consider a range of social issues, from immigration to the environmental crisis. Since its conception in Marfa in 2010, the program has traveled to the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis, to Houston as part of Fotofest, and to New York with the Rauschenberg Foundation. 

Quiet Earth takes its inspiration in part from the 1985 New Zealand post-apocalyptic film of the same name, and serves as an abstract documentation of the ways that humans have responded to the ecological crises of climate change with scientifically informed aesthetic practices. Quiet Earth is about an awareness of volume: That which we create, that which we consume, and that which may, in turn, consume us.

At the Rauschenberg Foundation In New York, Ballroom presented Agnes Denes’ Pyramids of Conscience – a large-scale work that was commissioned from the artist in 2005 for the Ballroom exhibition Treading Water. The Pyramids of Conscience were recently included in a major retrospective of Denes’ work at The Shed. Click here for more information. 

Ballroom Marfa welcomed Autre Ne Veut for a special performance on October 9th, 2013 debuting their new album Anxiety. 

“Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love” – Sigmund Freud

Anxiety was the full-length follow up to Autre Ne Veut’s 2010 self-titled debut, which was for many the definitive post-millennial Failure Pop statement outside of time and style. Born April 20th, 1982 Arthur Ashin is the first of two children and the only son of American ex-patriots living in rural Kenya. He’s struggled with minor bouts of depression throughout his life, but a year of intensive psychoanalysis helped Arthur to realize that anxiety was at the crux of his problems.

Anxiety is in some sense Ashin closing a chapter on his adolescence through song-form depictions of his own relationship struggles and ecstasies. Like a collection of photographs, each featuring our anti-hero surrounded by lovers, friends, and family and, ultimately, the world, Ashin himself is peripheral to the action. He is always a little too aware of the joke, laughing at the wrong time.

The influences on Anxiety range from David Byrne to Lee “Scratch” Perry, Laurie Anderson and Annie Lennox to Katy Perry and Rihanna. But Arthur’s primary influence – and the influence most evident in his music – is of karaoke – the solitary person singing along with their favorite song. In karaoke we get to be someone bigger than who we usually are. When we sing karaoke or when we sing in the shower, we get to be gods; gods with bars of soap, gods with plastic cups in our hands.