“… cloud chamber orchestra‘s brilliant, improvised scores rewire the relationship between live music and silent film… they leave us somewhere we do not know, but somewhere we need to be.”
–Dr. Patricia Zimmerman, Professor of Screen Studies, Co-Director of FingerLakes Environmental Film Festival

“… gorgeous, meditative…. cloud chamber orchestra creates music of spectral beauty…” –Anil Prasad, Interviews

cloud chamber orchestra.

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creating music for silent film since 2008

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robby aceto
guitars, atmospherics, prepared instruments.
peter dodge
trumpet, flugelhorn, piano, percussion, toy instruments.
chris white
cello & effects.
greg mcgrath
live sound & recordist

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cloud chamber orchestra / GRASS: music for the film available now on cd baby

cloud chamber orchestra has regularly premiered improvisational scores for silent films since 2008, including performances with
Grass: A Nation’s Battle For Life (dir Arthur Shoedsack and Merriam Cooper, 1922)
October (dir Sergei Eisenstein, 1918)
Battleship Potemkin (dir Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
Storm Over Asia (dir V. I. Pudovkin, 1928)
The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (dir Robert Weine, 1928)
Die Bergekatze (dir Ernst Lubitsch, 1921)
Beauty and the Beast (dir jean Cocteau, 1946)
The Epic of Everest (John Noel, 1924)
Nanook of the North (dir Robert Flaherty, 1922)
The Crowd (dir King Vidor, 1929)
Tess of the Storm Country (Mary Pickford, 1922)
The Great White Trail

… improvisational trio Cloud Chamber Orchestra accomplish a remarkable event at Ithaca College in June of 2013; led by a painstakingly polished and manipulated beacon of archival footage on the main screen of the theater, the trio begins a sweetly protracted expedition for all in the auditorium with their symbiotic tones, rakes, counterpoint nexuses and motifs. An invocation prompts the viewer to first interpret the wonder of the cosmos and its foreboding magic through the screen’s iconography and grace, laden with magentas, indigos, and violet proscenia, and, with the split second support of their weightless choral notes, following like a giant gentle hand rising from the floorboards, the adventure becomes a savvy, yet organic transmutation into an enrapturing cascade of thoughts, evolving perceptions, and ecstatic meditation. It’s an original wonder.

I implore you to visit this link and worship the mystical corridors of this performance. Unique in the very best, most archetypal definition of the word. Congratulations, Robby and Company.  –P Elliot Doherty, author (Damselfly, Edith’s Aria, The Curvature)

cloud chamber orchestra in their 2014 appearance at the new directions cello festival;
this is the full-length film of their improvised score for
A Trip to the Planets
(a creation story; original found-footage abstract film montage by ra)