Sunday 11 October 2026, 7.30pm
Sonic Cinema presents a rare screening of Tony Conrad’s audiovisual experiment Loose Connection (1973/2011) alongside a live solo performance by violinist Billy Steiger.
Shot in 1973 and revisited in 2011, Loose Connection is an experimental documentary of family life on West 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan, where Tony Conrad lived with Beverly Grant and their son Ted. Using a specially designed rotating camera mount, Conrad interrupts the viewer's spatial orientation with fragmentary, flickering images, anchored by the staccato noise of the street. The result is at once a snapshot of New York life in the early 1970s, now unavoidably nostalgic, and an interrogation of objectivity.
Perhaps best known for his stroboscopic film The Flicker (1966) and his music with the Theatre of Eternal Music, also known as the Dream Syndicate, and German experimental rock band Faust, Tony Conrad (1940–2016) pioneered work with visual phenomena and sustained tone that helped shape decades of experimental film and music that followed. Moving just as freely between film & video, music, sculpture, and public access television, his multidisciplinary practice resists easy categorisation, often challenging the modes of production and relationships of power embedded within media forms.
Please note: due to the flashing images in this film, it may not be suitable for people with epilepsy or other light sensitivity conditions.
PROGRAMME:
Courtesy the Estate of Tony Conrad and Greene Naftali, New York.
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Billy Steiger is an artist working across performance, recording, drawing, and printmaking. This work often takes systems of reproduction, transmission and mediation as both material and subject.
Active/upcoming solo projects include:
- a proposed (re)history of technology, using the vibrating string as framing mechanism.
- an album of modified pipe organ recordings, to be released by OtoRoku in 2027.
- an ongoing investigation into audio compression algorithms and the artefacts and loss inherent to digital/analogue boundary states.
Active group projects include:
- O Yama O (w/ Keiko Yamamoto, Rie Nakajima, Marie Roux)
- X-Ray Hex Tet (w/ Paul Abbott, Edward George, Crystabel Riley, Pat Thomas, Seymour Wright)
- Portraits (w/ Daniel Blumberg, Seymour Wright)
Completed(?) solo projects include:
- composing and recording the score for Stacy Martin's short film Amaretti
- Box (for EKM) for piano and string quartet, premiered by Apartment House in 2024
- Loud Object, a 2023 violin record.
https://billysteiger.bandcamp.com/
