TIM MOTZER
Philadelphia-based experimental guitarist Tim Motzer will present a solo concert, with music inspired by a film that will be shown simultaneously, as part of the New Jersey Film Festival in New Brunswick, Sept. 15.
The film, which is abstract and titled “Grounding,” was made by the festival’s director, Al Nigrin.
“What I do when I play live is, I improvise, really, but I kind of look at it as spontaneous composition,” said Motzer in an interview with Nigrin that can be seen in the video below. “I walk in without anything prepared other than the electronic gear that I have, and my guitars. That’s my palette of sounds.”
The music, he said, is “created with looping and a variety of pedals that are basically little pedals that have microprocessors in them. So that as I send the acoustic-electric guitar through, it changes the sound, does micro-looping, and all that builds into an orchestration.”
Motzer has often worked with a visual element, before.
“I had many, many friends who were (visual) artists, and got to hang out in their studios, and I really was inspired by that,” he said in the interview. “I think they go hand in hand: The music studio, the art studio. There is a link, there is a lineage that ties that together, for me.”
Nigrin got to know Motzer by being a fan of Motzer’s jazz fusion band PAKT, which also features bassist Percy Jones, guitarist Alex Skolnick and drummer Kenny Grohowski. Nigrin and Motzer were talking one day and, as Nigrin remembers in the video interview, “He said, ‘Why don’t I do a show at Rutgers?’ And I thought about it. And I said, ‘We really do films, we really don’t do music.’ But we had done a number of these (multimedia) things in the past.”
Motzer will perform Sept. 15 at 7 p.m. at Voorhees Hall at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Visit njfilmfest.com.
Here is Nigrin interviewing Motzer:
And here is an example of Motzer’s music:
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