Portrait of a Label as a title for the collection of musical works needs little explanation, since the album simply gathers together, in chronological order of their release, single tracks, representative images, so to speak, from each of the MN Records CDs, from ‘The Piano Sings’ in 2005 to ‘The Glare’ in 2009 (with The Coldest Place on Earth as a bonus track that connects both these albums). A personally-owned and self-curated record label gives a composer the power of independently presenting his recorded work-as-collection with a frequency and diversity that is denied to him by a major label. Such a compilation demonstrates how a composer may collect and connect everything across genres - chamber music, song cycles, orchestral music, collaborations, operas and soundtracks for the films of other film-makers and present them with an often disarming frequency. The music presented in this way then becomes part of an ever-increasing database, one of the purposes of which is to provide soundtracks for my films!
 
50000 Photos Can’t Be Wrong is a 22 minute multi-sectioned film in which my music, moving and still images interlace and engage in a dialogue of rhythm a intonation and acquired meaning. The title originated in a score commissioned by the Great North Run Cultural Festival in 2007 entitled 50000 Pairs of Feet Can't Be Wrong. When I was on a tour of Italy promoting my photobook ‘Sublime’ [Volumina, 2008], one concert venue accidentally replaced 'Pairs of Feet' with 'Photos', which obviously suggested to me a new audio-visual work, in which my own images replace the computer-based images of Richard Fenwick and Moshine with material derived from the 2000 or so photos in ‘Sublime’, generally re-animating the ‘photos in series’ but which are occasionally combined with genuine video material. The film enclosed in this compilation is a shortened version of ‘50000’ - the first and last movements of the 2007 work have been used as soundtracks for, respectively, my films ‘Slow Men Walking’ and ‘Witness 1’ and ‘Witness 2’.
 
CINE OPERA looks at a small selection of my photographs, unaccompanied by music, in their own right. It presents extracts from various of the photographic series concerned with recording the occurrence of time and the materiality of space, whether by conveying an atmospheric impression of a place with various randomly-selected exposures (Barcelona Light), the physical attribute of an object concerned with the act of seeing (Optical Theory), the random law of encounters (Beaubourg Minder), or that of the intensity of moment of boredom in an Italian opera house observing a less bored audience member (Greyman). The book takes its name from an extended photographic and series entitle CINE OPERA which I shot earlier in 2010 at the Teatro Cine Opera in the centre of Mexico City- a 1940s cinema now in a state of total but visually-stunning disrepair. I have become somewhat obsessed with the tragic loss of this building through neglect and self-destruction coupled and equally fascinated by a building whose sole purpose was to throw a beam of light on a screen: that screen will never be illuminated by that beam, but ironically a new set of light beams has appeared through the sun shining through holes in the ceiling during the two rare mornings when I had the privilege of shooting both stills and video there.

Michael Nyman August 2010