by Micah Magee

As the last lights dim on this year's Jazz Festival, as the final note fades from your inner ear, as the teardrop ripples the surface of your drink, as you contemplate the utter bleakness of a future without this synthesis of brilliance and energy, have hope. You do not have to fall back into that dark parade of tired uninspired trudge just yet. From September 22 to 26, Cinematexas Film Festival will be screening an array of some of the best experimental audiovisual shorts worldwide. Especially interesting to those musically inclined will be the newly added Eye and Ear Film and Music Series, presented in part by Epistrophy Arts.

Eye and Ear celebrates artists who have partaken in the fusion of avant-garde music and improvisational film. Guest of honor Michael Snow will grace Central Presbyterian Church with his free jazz ensemble, CCMC, Saturday night, while Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Ken Vandermark's Aaly Trio shake the foundations of Ceremony Hall.

"For a long time I've been interested in a series examining the parallels between the musical techniques of jazz and the way in which film is visually carried out," said Jen Procter, who runs Cinematexas with Rachel Tsangari and Bryan Poyser. "Austin is so interested and savvy to both film and music that there is a really strong audience for specialized screenings and events."

In the four years since its founding, Cinematexas has developed an international reputation as a festival that explores the short film genre and celebrates film as art. The Eye and Ear series is a natural outgrowth of the festival's commitment to providing an outlet for films that take risks and cross the boundaries of the medium. Each of the artists featured pushes the limits of what is known as music. Each has inspired the process of experimental and improvisational filmmaking.

Michael Snow, for example, is regarded in some circles as the most important living North American artist, due to his prolific, groundbreaking activity in painting, sculpture, video, film, photography, holography, drawing, writing, and sound. Over the past forty years he has established himself and CCMC (John Oswald, Paul Dutton) at the forefront of electro-acoustic spontaneous composition. In addition to the CCMC concert, which will be opened by Austin's Tina Marsh, Michael Snow will screen a four-and-a-half hour "sound film," Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (thanks to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen, the short film Seated Figures (a 40-minute exploration of landscape from the perspective of an exhaust pipe), and So Is This (a text in which each shot is a single word). A tribute to the avant-garde films of the 1950s through 1970s, the development of which paralleled the free jazz movement, will feature Snow's jazz and film fusion piece, New York Eye and Ear Control (1964).

Ken Vandermark, another free jazz great and recent recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, performs Sunday with the Aaly Trio. Like the Golden Arm Trio, who will open the show, the Aaly Trio performs live with film screenings and has toured Europe with a film whose soundtrack they helped create, Dutch Harbor. Thurston Moore, Ikne Mori, and Jim O'Rourke are billed to play together Friday night. If Sonic Youth fans grab all the tickets to that show before you get a chance to stand in line, you can still catch Miranda July, the grand winner of last year's festival and 21-year-old multimedia legend, who will be showing her latest performance piece, Love Diamond, in another festival program.

There is, naturally, always the possibility that the end of the Jazz Festival does not upset you whatsoever. Maybe the tear in your beer was one of relief at not having to pass up one wondrous act for another any longer. You might be looking forward to curling up under your covers, exhausted, full of enough sights and sounds to tide you over for the long winter. In that case, may your dreams be swell and simple and the night long enough to accommodate the flicker in your inner eye.