Mikel Rouse's Music for Minorities

New York-based, Missouri-born composer/filmmaker, mixes an urban aesthetic with Middle American surrealism in a unique approach to storytelling in the media age. 

“a quirkily humorous and sometimes more serious take on America” - The Irish Times

Music For Minorities, commissioned by UCLA Live, was shaped, sonically and conceptually, by the time Rouse spent in rural Northern Louisiana at a college artist-in-residence program arranged by Meet The Composer, Inc. along with the North Central Louisiana Arts Council, Louisiana Tech University and Lincoln Parish School Board. As Rouse explains, “I got to know some of these really old delta blues guys. I kind of got back into playing guitar more and hanging out with them, just playing music. I think you can see the progression from Test Tones to Minorities. You can still hear the sort of metric combinations I like to use, but the flavor starts to change. There’s a progression with those two records as I got further and further into the delta and further back into playing guitar.”

On the visual side, too, Music For Minorities mixes talking heads from rural Louisiana, some sporting accents so thick they need subtitles, with snippets of Manhattanites enlisted from Rouse’s own circle of friends and colleagues (including choreographer Merce Cunningham). No one from either locale quite gets to finish a story, but their dialogue is edited into a kind of music, their images into visual poetry.

“I shot the film over two and a half years, doing interviews with people I knew in the Delta during my residency and in New York,” he explains, “I wanted to come up with a different way of working with film and live performance. I started to focus on how people actually consume media nowadays. Channel surfing – to me, that’s how people live with television. Part of it is because television is so bad, part of it is because it’s a new vocabulary. You can go around 500 channels in 20 minutes. The whole non-narrative thing is really natural to me. I like to think of Music For Minorities as romantic channel surfing. Some stories almost resolve, but it’s like when you’re watching movies around the TV dial. You might find one whole movie, but usually it’s just twenty minutes here, twenty minutes there, it doesn’t matter. You still realize whether the guy gets the girl or when something else happens. You see some infomercials, you see some news, you see a number of things. I’m taking that exact same experience and presenting it from a different perspective.”

Test Tones and Music For Minorities (along with the new releases International Cloud Atlas, House Of Fans and Love At Twenty) are available via iTunes. Music For Minorities is packaged as a CD/DVD two-disc set, containing both the music and video imagery from the live piece.