Created over two days in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina, Blackalachia is a 67 minute live performance film conceptualised by, starring, and directed by Moses Sumney, featuring songs from Sumney’s albums Græ and Aromanticism.

In Blackalachia, Sumney reconceptualises the concert film; there is no audience, his stage is the nature around him, the light follows the natural trajectory of the day as it fades to black. The environment of the Appalachians has long been a source of inspiration for Sumney, and he’d frequently take solo writing trips to the mountains - but externally he also drew from a wealth of visual resources for Blackalachia; the Aretha Franklin documentary Amazing Grace; various Sun Ra performances; the tableaux of the photographer Deana Lawson. His long-time cinematographer, Cristina Dunlap, helped Sumney pull all these threads together, resulting in a live performance film like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Says Sumney of the project, “Over the course of two days, we filmed 14 songs, totally live, the trees as our audience, the grasshoppers our background singers. The film is a wild imagining of what can happen when we seek not just to reclaim nature, but to reintegrate with it.”

“There is a history of Black people in Appalachia,” he says. “There is a history of Black music being the foundation of bluegrass and country. There is a history of migration into and out of Appalachia. I’m so deeply invested in a reintegration into nature.” 
Click here for more on the project 
Blackalachia was commissioned by WePresent, the digital arts platform of WeTransfer