Sarah Hennies & Tristan Kasten-Krause
Prisoner’s Cinema
Music
Prisoner’s Cinema is a collaboratively-composed and performed work by Sarah Hennies and Tristan Kasten-Krause for double bass, percussion, and a single candle flame.
This piece explores the links between sight, hearing, and perception and is partly inspired by “trataka,” a style of yogi purification meditation that involves staring at a single point (such as a candle flame) for extended durations. The instruments are closely tuned to one another to produce beating effects and psychoacoustic phenomena such as “three-dimensional” sound, where it feels as though the music is moving through space.
Hennies and Kasten-Krause believe in a style of adventurous music that is both challenging and accessible and that offers any potential audience member an experience that may change and broaden their experience of music, sound, the world, and themselves.
Tickets to singular performances go on sale January 10, but you can secure your Festival Pass to The Dark now!
Sarah Hennies is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer and trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic ensemble music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship, a 2019 Grants to Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has received additional support from the Creative Work Fund, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. She has performed internationally and the 2023 large-ensemble work “Motor Tapes” was featured as part of the 2024 Whitney Biennial. She is currently an assistant professor of music at Bard College.
Tristan Kasten-Krause is a bassist and composer living in Brooklyn, New York whose work enlarges the minutiae of close tones and subtle gestures. As a bassist he has been credited with lending his “low-end authority to vital New York institutions” (The New Yorker) and praised for his “heavenly” (The Guardian) original compositions. His work exploring duration and expanded time has led to multiple appearances on the Hudson Basilica’s 24-Hour Drone festival, performances of extended, endurance-based works with extreme metal band Scarcity, and the premiere of a marathon 6-hour opera (2023’s Stranger Love) for the LA Phil. Over the last decade Tristan has worked with adventurous and forward-thinking artists such as Alvin Lucier, Sigur Ros, David Lang, Ichiko Aoba, Steve Reich and Henry Threadgill. He has performed in New York’s preeminent new music ensembles including The Bang on a Can All-Stars, Talea Ensemble, Wet Ink, Contemporaneous and Ensemble Signal.
The duo of Sarah Hennies & Tristan Kasten-Krause works collaboratively to compose large-scale compositions employing drones, psychoacoustic phenomena, and extended techniques on double bass and an array of gongs, bells, vibraphone, and other percussion instruments. Their work includes delicate interplay of high-pitched tones, deep resonances from bass tones and gongs, and patient, slowly unfolding extended durations that evoke a mysterious sonic landscape.
The Quiet Sun – Best Contemporary Classical Music (May 2025, Bandcamp)
Best Experimental Music (May 2025, Bandcamp)
“The Quiet Sun is a mesmerizing exploration of sustained tones and textural alchemy, where percussion and bass dissolve into a single, evolving organism.” – A Closer Listen
“The Quiet Sun is a subtle study in sonic intimacy and the profound beauty of sustained attention—an inspired meeting of two distinct yet harmonically aligned voices.” – SoundOhm
“Hennies and Kasten-Krause forge a kind of two-headed vision seemingly capable of seeing everything in front of and behind them.” – Marc Masters, Bandcamp Daily
“Marvels of shifting timbre, motion, and texture, stunning back-and-forth efforts to hold sound in all of its liquid, elusive splendor.” – Peter Margasak, Bandcamp Daily
