Of the three Bang on a Can composers - the royal family of the downtown music scene - Michael Gordon has the most turbulent soul. His deeply spiritual music (he is serious about his Jewish background) always seems shadowed by darkness, even when it's bursting with life. And now he's met his match in filmmaker Bill Morrison, with whom he's collaborated on "Decasia."

The piece, presented in league with Ridge Theater, had its live American premiere Thursday night at St. Ann's Warehouse, a capacious performance space in Brooklyn's fashionable DUMBO district. Morrison's film was projected onto three mesh-covered scaffolds surrounding the audience, around whom the 55 energetic young players of the Manhattan School of Music's Tactus Contemporary Ensemble made their excellent contribution.

The lights and equipment made the space terribly hot, but those seeking a respite could hit the bar, or just enjoy the view of tank-topped violinists and shirtless brass players.

The able director of Tactus, Patti Monson, conducted from a high perch, with earphones on her head and a battery of film projectors at her feet. Laurie Olinder contributed a slowly changing sequence of still images which softly reinforced Morrison's disturbing celluloid canvas.

"Decasia" - a word that Gordon and Morrison made up as a gloss on "Fantasia," the mother of all music-film collaborations - is all about decay, specifically as it relates to the chemically fragile material of films from the silent era but more generally to history and to life itself.

"Decasia" has been shown as a standard film-with-soundtrack at such venues as the Sundance Festival. But it's crucial to note that, while director and composer found a deep sympathy in their subject, Morrison edited his film to Gordon's music, not the standard Hollywood procedure.

The big thing about Morrison's photoplay - a series of cinematic "found objects" left unaltered by digital tricks - is how film can deteriorate in so many different ways, and how our eyes and emotions can interpret the experience.

A couple dancing in a clip from a screwball comedy is ceaselessly pummeled with gunshots. A screaming man is saved from drowning while he and his rescuer are eaten up by a central pulse of white light. Roller coaster cars shoot out from an edge of a frame that seems to churn in flames.

More serene but still sinister sequences, from Middle Eastern travelogues or industrial films, are inserted to match the undulating, expressive rhythms of Gordon's searing score, a slowly shifting minimalist pattern of mallet percussion tracks and deliberately mistuned tone-blasts from winds and brass.

The creators' message - decay devours us all - is not a subtle one, and it's easily forgotten once one leaves the theater. But, oh, how beautiful destruction can be in the hands of those whom talent has touched.

DECASIA. Music by Michael Gordon, film by Bill Morrison. Tactus Contemporary Ensemble, Patti Monson, conductor. St. Ann's Warehouse, 38 Water St., Brooklyn; Thursday. Repeated 7:30 and 10 tonight, 8 p.m. tomorrow; tickets 718-254-8779. 

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc. 

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