2011 - 2013

A Psychedelic Sound-Scape, Installation & Film Experience

Prelude to the All Night Dustbowl
Work song created at Texas' Longest Hammer Choir
Link to work-song

Original Happening: 
JV's Dirt Farm, 2011, Austin Texas
Premiere Show:
Jo's Cafe, 2012, Austin Texas
Show and installation at :
Trans Pecos Festival of Music and Love, 2012 Marfa Texas
Highwire Arts, 2012 San Antonio Texas
Mass Gallery, 2013 Austin Texas

Both films made at Texas' Longest Hammer Choir will be preserved in the Texas Archive of The Moving Image


Conceived and directed by Texas artist Andy Rihn, and supported by a grant
from The Idea Fund, ‘Texas' Longest Hammer Choir ‘ was an original art
happening and avant-garde form of film-making, starring over 200 denim-clad
people striking hammers head-to-head, creating a moving work song in an
East Austin dirt farm on November 12, 2011. The features of this event will be
arranged and shown in an original multi-media installation. It will be a record
of this mysterious art happening as well as a sight, sound and denim-heavy
experience for the viewer.

The work song that was made that day is entitled ‘Prelude To The All Night Dust
Bowl’. It is a real-time recording of the Hammer Choir. A musician, on top of
the moving film cart, played a Rhodes keyboard that created the melody for the
chime-like rhythm of the hammers. In one continuous shot, two films were made
the day of the Hammer Choir. One was filmed from the front of the camera cart
as it snaked through the pairs of hammer musicians and one from the rear of the
cart, each a very different perspective of the same event.

Described by Culture Map writer Ramona Flume as “a fleeting happening that
captured a distinct kind of mystic happiness, a snapshot of a modern-day,
psychedelic Texas spirit, that only comes around once in the while in the form of
something truly beautiful.”

Link to Culture Map Article