Gravity Radio is a song cycle interspersed with actual radio reports taken from the AP Newswire. The original inspiration came from the physicist Raymond Chiao and his experiments with superconductors and - gravity waves, which exist in theory but have eluded detection. I took the elusiveness of gravity waves as a springboard for a song cycle that would float and mutate through a combination of sound and visual ether.

The sound is composed of string quartet, shortwave radio frequencies and radio reports (along with the songs and the band) and the visual incorporates multichannel video representing a visual kalidascope of earthbound images.

The instrumentation is for singer/guitarist, bass, drums, keyboard, 3 backup singers and string quartet (although this can be enlarged to a small chamber orchestra with winds and brass).

For the last fifteen years, composer and performer Mikel Rouse has been developing a technically and thematically adventurous trilogy of multimedia operas that have played in theatres and festivals around the world. He's putting the finishing touches on the final installment of this series, The End Of Cinematics, in anticipation of its September 17th premiere at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Rouse's musical and theatrical repertoire has its roots in the high art-meets-popular culture, mix-and-match aesthetic of the early '80s downtown Manhattan music and art scene from which Rouse emerged. In Dennis Cleveland, his most celebrated work (and the second part of his trilogy), he transformed the landscape of trash-talk TV into opera. Rouse himself played the rabble-rousing host, a character who, it turns out, is not so much holding a volatile show together as falling apart in front of the cameras. This provocative piece of environmental theatre, in which cast members were planted amongst the audience and the audience itself was featured on video monitors, blurred the lines between performance and reality in the same way the "Jenny Jones"/"Jerry Springer" type talk fests confused personal confession with popular entertainment. Dennis Cleveland began its life with a sold-out run at tiny New York City avant-garde venue the Kitchen, where theatre-goers had to turn to scalpers to nab hard-to-come-by tickets, and returned to Manhattan years later in more full-blown form, for a critically acclaimed engagement at Lincoln Center. Village Voice critic Kyle Gann called it "the most exciting and innovative opera since Einstein on the Beach."

To purchase advance tickets: visit the CAC (900 Camp St.); click here; or call the CAC Box Office at 504-528-3800.