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PAUL KALBACH
BUMP & MIMP are both hand-painted films; BUMP painted on clear 16mm leader with felt-tip pens, and MIMP painted on black leader with the additional use of etching and mezzo-tint tools.
BUMP
MIMP
All music in these experimental films and videos was composed by Paul Kalbach, with the exception of the music in “A Better Place?” which was composed by George Rowen
LASSOED RAINBOW: Animation is an experiment in exploring a single painting (”Lassoed Rainbow”, oil on canvas, 108”H x 162”W) through the use of 16mm film single frame techniques, combined with multiple exposures and real-time camera moves. I composed a different soundtrack than the original score of “Lassoed Rainbow” (see below) due to the frenetic nature of the imagery.
I composed a piece in 1975 called LASSOED RAINBOW for an installation at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. It was a series based on a chart of sound / color analogies in an issue of “Scientific American”. If you take the light-wave frequencies of the visible spectrum and shift them down 20 or so octaves, you can make correlations. For example, green would be middle C. It’s very subjective of course; what sounds green to me may be totally different for someone else, but here is the way I mapped the underlying drone of each piece:
That completes the visible spectrum, but I added an eighth piece, BEYOND ULTRAVIOLET to complete an octave with F#.
F# RED
A# ORANGE
B YELLOW
C GREEN
C# BLUE
D INDIGO
E VIOLET
F# BEYOND
ULTRA-
VIOLET
The installation consisted of a “spectral passage” designed by Aleksandra Kasuba of New York, which allowed visitors to walk “up the spectrum” through a series of seven nylon sculptural color chambers, each saturated with light of one hue of the rainbow, from red through violet. At the end of the spectral tunnel was an eighth chamber called the “Primordial Swamp”.
Eight independent sound systems for each chamber played loops of my corresponding compositions. They all played simultaneously, interacting with each other as one walked through the space, but the Orange soundtrack would become predominant over the Red soundtrack as one moved from the Red chamber into the Orange chamber, and so on. The show at the De Young played for three months in 1975 simultaneously with a gallery show of my paintings at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, as part of the city-wide Rainbow Show event.
In the performance of CARBON DIOXIDE BLUES, I play the piano with chunks of dry ice. Kalbach sounded the Global Warming Alarm in 1979! Actually, in 1970 I thought the oceans would be dead in 1979, so I’m quite amazed that we are all still here! 
Activating the piano strings with the solid carbon dioxide causes them to screech and wail, much like the American Eagle on a silver dollar does when it comes into contact with dry ice. Thanks to the student crew at Laney College.
Activating the piano strings with the solid carbon dioxide causes them to screech and wail, much like the American Eagle on a silver dollar does when it comes into contact with dry ice. Thanks to the student crew at Laney College.
My wife Masako came up with the concept for “A BETTER PLACE?”, so we collaborated on this exploration of what one considers to be a better life; that of a human or that of a dog?
Video wallpaper STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS for one minute or one day.
FILM & VIDEO
My wife Masako came up with the concept for “A BETTER PLACE?”, so we collaborated on this exploration of what one considers to be a better life; that of a human or that of a dog?