Cabin Music Review: The New Classical FM
Deeply immersive… His musical style is an amalgam of Debussy, Mompou, Ellington, Cecil Taylor and Keith Jarrett. The music floats above appropriate images of the diverse locations he’s inhabited, ranging in style from naturalistic landscapes to nearly hallucinatory manipulated images… Cabin Music is a beautiful film, truly exploratory and poetic. The music is wonderfully evocative of inner and outer states of being, which approach bliss. It is a one-of-a-kind experience.”
Cabin Music Review: The Independent Critic
Cabin Music is intimate yet universal. Cabin Music feels both deeply personal yet also meant to be shared. Cabin Music challenges the senses while also intriguing the mind. Cabin Music is the work of someone who had grand ambitions yet it also feels like the work of someone determined to get down to the roots of himself, his artistry, and the world around him.
A sublime fusion of piano performance, environment, cinematography, sound recording, and film montage weave themselves together into a subconscious tapestry of experience and being inviting us not just into the cabin but into all the spaces and places that constructed the life of the cabin. These spaces and places come alive in Cabin Music, at times rather matter-of-factly and other times through aural immersion and enveloping of all the senses.
Filmmaker 5 Interview
I just love everything about filmmaking and love learning about it. It is the only medium that can put people in a room watching the film and they can go to Japan, go to Siberia, go to France, go to all those places in New York and the cabin in the blink of an eye. You know it’s not exactly the same, but it is a much closer version of getting there. There is an immersive capacity that only cinema can do. Film lets you actually look at the thing. And not only looking at the thing, but you’re also seeing the thing moving frame by frame and you’re hearing sounds. It’s strongly immersing you in a place. And that’s it—the goal is that you’re in the cabin at the end of the film.
The Story of Birds Review: Fanfare Magazine
"Carson’s method inhabits a space between composed and improvised music... The music has a diametric effect, being meditative in the left hand and quite virtuosic in the right… I admire idealism, and Carson, who was something of a composing prodigy, took a brave step away from studies at the New England Conservatory to backpack and farm in Canada before building his cabin and using his life there as his artistic inspiration (I can’t help but be reminded of Roberts Frost’s alternate life as a farmer). This is gentle music sincerely meant, that carries through on its aims, and Carson, a gifted pianist, offers superb performances... no one can doubt the uniqueness of Carson’s idiom."
Pianist James Carson on Creating a New Form of Music
When I began the project of remaking the piano, nearly twenty years ago, I had no idea where it would lead. I was pursuing a more traditional path as a composer and improviser at the New England Conservatory, with only a distant sound in my head and a faint vision of what might be possible if I could remove myself fully from the process of creating music. I did not know if it would be possible, but I knew my body and mind could not execute it without change. A plan emerged: to walk away from music, to travel and farm around the world, then build a cabin and practice in it. After that it was not clear what would happen.
Cabin Music Review: Orcasound
It is the type of film that you go into thinking you won’t be able to connect with and then you do. Beauty and wisdom win you over. The poetry created by the sound and visuals soothe the soul. James Carson is not the only one who can heal as a result of the film.
Besides figuring out his own life, Carson has also created a film that will be a treat of the senses for all who watch it. Between the sound and visuals, a symphony has been created. There is not much dialogue in the doc, but words are not needed in this instance.
James Carson and Lyndon Rochelle at Rockwood Music Hall
Carson is adamantly opposed to labeling his music, instead comparing it to bird songs or any other natural expression. It does not need a name to exist; it just is. Still, the repetitious melodies, shimmering piano flights, and trance inducing ostinatos came as close to John Adams minimalism as any jazz performance I’ve heard… The performance reiterated the concept that nothing that repeats is ever the same, even if only because we have changed in the intervening moments.
The Story of Birds – Official Music Video
Cabin Music – Soapbox Gallery, New York
Huun Huur Tu with Cabin Music – SubCulture, NY
Carson Rochelle – Rockwood Music Hall, NY
