NEXT ATLANTIS
2010 · 19 minutes · Audiovisual work for projected video, instrumental music, and electronic sound.
Music by Sebastian Currier
Video by Paweł Wojtasik
Presented in live orchestral and string-quartet versions, as well as in a self-contained version with recorded sound.
Next Atlantis is a reflection on New Orleans as a place shaped by water, environmental instability, cultural memory, and continual transformation. Moving between disappearing wetlands, industrial infrastructure, city life, and intimate portraits of its inhabitants, the work considers destruction and regeneration as inseparable forces.
Next Atlantis, premiere, January 29, 2010, Carnegie Hall
About the Work
Next Atlantis is an audiovisual collaboration between composer Sebastian Currier and filmmaker Paweł Wojtasik. Created in response to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the work brings projected moving images into dialogue with instrumental music, prerecorded sound, and electronic elements. It has been presented with live symphony orchestra and string quartet, as well as in a self-contained version with recorded sound.
The work moves through wetlands, waterways, industrial structures, damaged neighborhoods, city streets, and intimate encounters with New Orleans residents. Rather than recounting the disaster directly, it approaches the city as a place suspended between vulnerability and renewal—a landscape continually shaped by water, human intervention, cultural memory, and environmental change.
Music and image were conceived as equal, interdependent elements. Neither simply illustrates the other. At times they move together; at other moments they diverge, creating space between what is seen and what is heard. The electronic and environmental sounds further blur the boundary between musical composition and the acoustic life of the city.
The title imagines New Orleans as a possible future Atlantis: a city whose precarious relationship to water makes disappearance conceivable, even as its cultural vitality resists that fate. Destruction and regeneration remain inseparable throughout the work.
Writing on the Work
Anthony Tommasini, “Varied Sounds and a Message of Peace,” The New York Times, February 1, 2010
A review of the American Composers Orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall, including the world premiere of Sebastian Currier’s Next Atlantis with video by Paweł Wojtasik.
Read the review in The New York Times
Selected Presentations
Meno Avilys Film Center, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2017 — recorded soundtrack cinema version
SPACE, Portland, Maine, October 11, 2012 — string-quartet version presented with the Portland Chamber Music Festival
Symphony Space, New York, October 13, 2011 — performed by the Cassatt String Quartet
New World Symphony, Miami Beach, September 17, 2011
(Le) Poisson Rouge, New York, October 9, 2010 — performed by the Kronos Quartet
Annenberg Center, Philadelphia, January 30, 2010 — performed by the American Composers Orchestra
Carnegie Hall, New York, January 29, 2010 — world premiere, performed by the American Composers Orchestra