“My studio is like a big cathedral room... I feel like we are in a big potentially vibrating structure - it’s not inside, it’s outside…”

- Charlemagne Palestine

Part invocation, part performance film and part exploded biography, this feature length documentary and single-channel moving image work is structured as a series of revolving prisms through which to view the life and work of acclaimed visionary artist, composer and performer Charlemagne Palestine.

BODY MUSIC is an incandescent, kaleidoscopic sensory extravaganza that weaves unseen archival material dating back nearly 70 years with newly filmed 2018-19 private performances situated in Palestine’s cavernous Brussels studio and home.

Palestine‘s work expresses deeply embedded internal energies, a ritualistic use of physicality, motion and sound that represents a lifelong study of shamanic and animist theologies.

Courtin-Wilson’s perpetually floating camera passes over Palestine and his deities in his studio. Palestine suddenly appears in a forest. Smoke fills a darkened room. Note clusters slip into haptic play with light, movement and colour pulses, the seen with the unseen, interior with exterior as Palestine’s music recreates the physical world around him. Courtin-Wilson follows suit, structuring a series of elemental visions or ‘conjurings’ that take place in different environments - a waking dream world that materialises across various forms - culminating in Palestine’s extraordinary, self-constructed home studio.

The cumulative effect of juxtaposing multiple performances of the same work staged across decades evokes and mirrors Palestine’s use of tone clusters and overtones in his piano playing, saturating eye, ear and body in a singular experiential tapestry.

BODY MUSIC deepens and re-imagines a collective body of work, spanning 60 years, through the incorporation of rare and unreleased materials from Palestine’s own extensive personal archive, while also attaining a delicate intimacy with Charlemagne’s private world as he contemplates his own legacy.

Hypnotic and trance-inducing, BODY MUSIC is a deeply emotional, potent mandala-like moving image work set to be completed in 2020.