Pianist James Carson has developed a new form of music and over the last twelve years has produced and directed Cabin Music, a feature film, to share it with the world. A childhood prodigy born with perfect pitch, Carson composed complete songs at age four and had his music performed by the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra at age sixteen, leading him to be called “one of the most gifted rising stars” by the Edmonton Journal. When he attended the New England Conservatory, however, his studies with Joe Maneri, Cecil Taylor, and the poet Robert Creeley led him to a dramatic life change: he walked away from music and spent two years backpacking and farming overland from Spain to Japan. After his return to Northern Alberta, Canada, he then spent five years designing, building, and practicing in a remote strawbale cabin. The musical result was multilayered, detailed, meditative, and harmonious. „I wanted to play the whole piano at once,” says Carson, “in the same way that a single breeze can cause the entire forest to dance and tremble in unison.”

Praised by Pulitzer-Prize-winning composer Milton Babbitt, who wrote of his “astonished joy” in response to Carson’s “exceptional pianism”, and by his teacher Robert Creeley, who called him a “genial genius”, Carson has been labeled a “meditative… piano texturalist” (Time Out New York), who creates “trance-inducing… shimmering arpeggiated figures, played with such speed as to invoke Coltrane-esque ‘sheets of sound’” (Feast of Music), on a “quest to create sounds that reflect the magnificence of nature” (Times of India). Carson creates wholly new music with each performance by removing his own intentions and instead receiving and channeling all forces and influences at the piano, both within and beyond the performance space, resulting in “delicate music surrounded by the aura of silence.” (Boston Phoenix). He lives in New York and returns regularly to his cabin.

Quotes:

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. 

The Independent Critic

“A lyrical, genre-defying feast for the senses, Cabin Music is a testament to the twin transcendent powers of music and nature.”

DOC NYC