Matana Roberts (New York) is an internationally renowned composer, band leader, saxophonist and sound experimentalist. She visits MOCAD for Media City’s opening night to present the Detroit premiere of Coin Coin Chapter Three (river run thee). Roberts’ ongoing Coin Coin project is a multi-chapter work of “panoramic sound quilting” that aims to expose the mystical roots of American creative expression, while maintaining a deep and substantive engagement with history, community, and political expression within improvisational music.

Since 2006 Matana Roberts has released eight solo recordings on Constellation Records and other labels, and has recorded as a guest musician with rock, pop and electronic groups as diverse as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, TV On The Radio and Thee Silver Mt. Zion. She has played with and alongside Henry Grimes, Roscoe Mitchell, Jayne Cortez, Meshell Ndegeocello, Pauline Oliveros, Savion Glover, Anthony Braxton, Julius Hemphill Sextet, Merce Cunningham and Chad Taylor among many others.

Malcolm Le Grice (England) founded the London Filmmakers’ Co-op Workshop in the late 1960s. He was also a founder of the legendary Filmaktion group, whose members proposed a more active, improvisational and participatory experience of cinema that re-envisioned the possibilities for film as a live event. His pioneering work of the 1960s and 70s explored the complex relationships between the filmmaking, projecting and viewing processes, showing an intense interest in the processes enabled by optical printers and the combination of different types and gauges of film stock.

For Media City’s opening night Malcolm Le Grice presents two of his most notable (and now rarely-presented) 16mm multiprojections dating from the Filmaktion period: Castle Two (1968, 30 min) and Threshold (1973, 17 min).