Cloud Chamber Orchestra was formed in 2007 to create live music for silent films. Since then the group has played with 5 different silent films, mostly as part of FLEFF (Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival). Like all of our films, this music was recorded live during the one public screening of "GRASS: A Nation's Battle for Life" at the festival, and was totally improvised. Not a note was written down or premeditated. I think my fellow improvisers would agree that the experience of creating musical "scenes" to compliment or illuminate the scenes on the screen as they happen in real time has been very enriching and inspiring. This whole process has been like discovering a beautiful hidden world in a different dimension. - Chris White, cellist 'Searing, haunting, mesmerizing, the Cloud Chamber Orchestra's brilliant, improvised score for the landmark documentary Grass (1924) rewires the relationship between music and silent film. It invites us as listeners to go elsewhere-within ourselves and beyond ourselves-on a sonic journey with the Bakhtiari people as they migrate. Emerging from the exquisite improvisations between Robby Aceto, Chris White, and Peter Dodge, this dazzling, densely textured, evocative score suggests that in Grass, live music conjures a new way to think in and through the landscapes of Iran. Here, past, present, and future converge in a penetrating, urgent polarity. Rather than driving the narrative, this rich, post-minimalist, post-ambient soundscape opens a way to see the film anew, as an equal collaboration and mysterious, ineffable dialogue between musicians, film, and audience. Accessible in it's rhythms and arcs yet complex in it's tonalities and timbres, pulsing yet meditative, emotional yet intellectual, the dialectics of controlled form and out-of-control risk place us into a new topography of sonic mountains, valleys, rivers and journeys, transcribing the imagery of Grass through sound. The Cloud Chamber Orchestra actually performs as a quartet, with the film as the fourth member. A cloud chamber creates a contained universe to observe the microlevel in an abstract, non-linear way-a metaphor for how this score moves us across conceptual and musical rivers. Listen again, and again. Immerse. Let go. This beautiful, deeply considered, and exquisitely rendered music winds itself deep into the listener, and leaves us somewhere we do not know, but where we need to be.' - Patricia Zimmermann, Professor of Screen Studies, Ithaca College and Co-director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival.