Captured in Sound: James Harrar on Cinema Soloriens

When silent film maker James Harrar made a short film, For Sun Ra, after jazz musician Sun Ra passed away in 1992, he set off a chain of events that would result in the great cosmic philosopher remaining a huge influence on his creativity for the next 20 years.

Attending a concert of the remaining Sun Ra band, The Arkestra, Harrar got talking to their chief saxophonist Marshall Allen, with the veteran musician inviting him to show him For Sun Ra at his home. “Marshall immediately saw the musical structures within it, and was singing to it and voicing rhythms,” Harrar says. From there, he was introduced to another Sun Ra member, Tommy ‘Bugs’ Hunter, who drummed for and sound engineered Sun Ra during his early New York City period. “I would spend days at [Hunter's] apartment listening to the most obscure Sun Ra recordings,” Harrar recalls. “Once he took me out to a jazz club and on a napkin starting writing out musical notations of what the band was playing. He offered me a ‘key’, guiding me on a new way to listen to music. At that moment it enabled me to anticipate the notes each musician was playing before they played it. It was like hearing music for the first time. Then he told me, ‘you have to take up an instrument, you need to make music for your own films.’”

It was these meetings that proved the catalyst for the pair’s project Cinema Soloriens, a collaboration that celebrates 20 years this year, and which comes to MelloMello in Liverpool over the second weekend in November (with an exhibition, archive footage screenings, a talk and a workshop with Allen on 8 Nov, and the full live performance from Allen, Harrar and percussionist Rogier Smal on 9 Nov). Described by Harrar as “an attempt to reveal deeper levels of interpretation within the visceral film poems,” Cinema Soloriens sees Harrar's own images and prose combine with a live soundtrack that has been created by a revolving cast of musicians over the past two decades, including but not limited to: Solar Skeletons, Bardo Pond’s Michael Gibbons, and Daevid Allen (Gong, Soft Machine). Others have become core members of the group. “Everyone brings their own style of cooking,” Harrar explains, “but I’m looking for more than just getting a group of talented people together and falling down the rabbit hole.”

The director’s films are highly structured, he says, with all collaborators receiving detailed notes before pouring their musical flourishes over the moving images. “The core meaning of my films haven’t changed over time,” Harrar comments. “My work centres around several common themes: spirituality, nature, beauty, magic, perception, ritual, alchemy, sensuality and poetry.” Like the music, which rolls around different sound environments, touching on various world folk, as well as jazz and more direct psych rock, Harrar’s films allow for plenty of grey area, warping and bending images to test the senses. He took early influences from Berks Filmmakers while at college at Pennsylvania, and cites Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome as having an early impact on his work. “It forever changed how I perceived visual art. Even poetry was no longer a word puzzle for me to explicate, but a living organic language that revealed itself clearer,” he remembers.

As Cinema Soloriens has developed, Harrar has taken to exploring his own heritage through his lyrics and imagery. He and his mother are Native American and, after visiting his mother’s old Tiwa reservation in New Mexico, Harrar researched the Tiwa dialect: “There was almost nothing,” he says, “save for one text from the 1800s that was a poorly translated Tiwa folk tale.” The filmmaker took it on himself to incorporate it into the performance. “If a language is lost, we lose a little bit of our collective human heritage. It is like losing a shade of a colour.”