The Fourth Continent CD & Blu Ray set

Disc 1 = The Fourth Continent Music CD
Disc 2 = The Fourth Continent Film Blu-Ray
Includes download codes

Solo electric & effected guitar, as heard in:

The Fourth Continent - a two channel short film reimagining the ‘conquest of the West’, composed of repurposed vintage archival footage, including a 1926 silent film, interspersed with contemporary scenes of the California desert, the decades bridged by a soundtrack of howling emanations from the electrical grid.

The music on this CD was improvised live on guitar and an array of effect boxes, recorded straight to a hard drive via two microphones in the fall of 2025. The initial goal was simply to document the sounds I tend to make when left to my own whims. Performances are largely unedited. Sometimes audible are the sounds of hands, slides and gator clips meeting strings, feet hitting pedals. A cricket makes an extended cameo.

Filming for The Fourth Continent began sometime around 2017 (though a few shots date back to 2009), with an initial assembly completed that year or the next. Most of the footage was shot in Imperial County, east of San Diego. I incorporated scenes from director Henry King’s The Winning of Barbara Worth, a melodramatic silent film about love, water and land, which was shot in the same area nearly a century prior, as well as Thirst, a 1932 newsreel hosted by the formidable Mr. William P. Whitsett of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Additional fun was had with Miracle in the Desert, a circa 1950s promotional video for the now largely abandoned resort developments of Imperial County’s Salton Sea, a man-made ecological disaster whose hauntingly lovely shores are now littered with fish bones, bird carcasses and toxic sludge. Over the ensuing years I returned to the film periodically, finessing the edit and experimenting with a number of different musical scores. In early 2026, I recognized a commonality between the music I’d been recording and the film I’d been editing. The one transformed the other and they became what they were meant to be all along.

This is a two channel (multi-screen) installation film, with two video images composed to be projected separately but in close proximity, allowing for moments of consonance and dissonance between the screens. This is impossible to replicate on a single Blu-Ray, so in the home video version the images directly abut one another, creating a more intimate relationship and the occasional set of identical image twins conjoined at the hip. If you’d care to watch one screen at a time I’ve included as a bonus feature each single channel as its own video. While the image is larger, each represents only half the picture, at least as I see it.- Bill Perrine