Liz Harris - Music For Two Films About Water *Pre-Order

Liz Harris has worked with film closely since she began making and performing music live - both her own work, and
that of various filmmakers - including a near decade long collaboration with Paul Clipson, and multiple live
collaborations with Dicky Bahto and Takashi Makino.
On Music For Two Films About Water she presents two recent scores for short films by the artists Tanja Engelberts and
Takashi Makino. Each film, as the album title suggests, is an exploration of water, though beyond that, each work and
soundtrack varies - blending literal, improvisatory and impressionistic translations of the theme. Her accompaniment
layers mercurial threads of mellotron, tape loops, Wurlitzer and field recordings.
Untitled (from We Exhale)
This piece was originally composed for the film We Exhale. In the film, artist Tanja Engelberts takes the perspective of
the river itself, tracing how centuries of damming, channelling, and industrial pollution have reduced the Rhône from a
living landscape to a hydraulic object—its breath slowly distorting as chemical processes break down what remains.
Her work asks what a poisoned river sounds like when it exhales, confronting us with damage that operates beyond
human timescales, already embedded in the river’s body. In her artistic practice, Engelberts investigates how landscapes
that are no longer visible can be documented. Rather than excavating the past, she collects and rearranges what she
finds on the surface—as a creative exposition of the present. Engelberts’ work places attention on the ‘here’ and ‘now’,
allowing traces of the past to be recognized while possible futures can be imagined.
Untitled (from Constellation)
This soundtrack scores the film iteration of a project by Takashi Makino titled Constellation, a collection of works
exploring how new meanings emerge through the arrangement of existing images, memories, and fragments. In the
film, images, appearing and disappearing within mercurial water textures, are clearly present before the viewer, yet
maintain their abstractness and imaginative nature until the very end—projected onto the screen and delivered to the
viewer as material for forming new images. Fantasy and reality merge in oceanic, lucid dream. Inspired by the way
ancient people connected scattered stars to create narratives, his work invites viewers to discover their own relationships
between images and construct new meanings from what already exists. In his artistic practice, Makino captures video of
ready-made objects including natural phenomena, humans, and cities, with various formats. In the editing process, he
layers and configures them into the fields of mesmerizing, shimmering textures that distinguish his imaginative films.
track listing:
1. Untitled (from We Exhale)
2. Untitled (from Constellation)