What Is Your Relationship to the Present Moment?

Director, composer, and producer, Marilyn McNeal has been creating short audio and video documentaries, original soundtracks and songs for over 20 years. In 1998, Marilyn began documenting street level protests and community gatherings in Manhattan and Brooklyn as a Media Studies graduate student at the New School for Social Research. Using a mini disc recorder and a webcam attached to her laptop, Marilyn applied her experience as a community health outreach worker to gather and curate stories of everyday people on the street. McNeal was an early web experimenter, leveraging the then nascent technologies of web audio and video to share her work online. Her early 2000’s work has been archived by the Internet Archive.

As a resident artist at several San Francisco and Oakland art collectives, Marilyn has lived, worked and performed with visual artists, filmmakers, circus performers, and theater professionals. This exposure deepened her interest in storytelling and led to her turning to American roots music as source material for her work. In summer 2011, Marilyn began making her own folk instruments from cardboard, string, wire and tin cans. She recorded and released two albums on Soundcloud that exemplify what happens when the analog and the digital intersect.

McNeal performed at the Y2K+1 Loopfest, and was selected to be one of four artists taking part in Signal Fire’s Outpost residency in Eastern Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains. She was tapped to participate in the Music For People & Thingamajigs Festival and was a presenter at the Kitchen Sisters “The Making Of” event at the SF MOMA.

In 2014, McNeal traveled to Russia where she taught workshops about the history and construction of the diddley bow in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Izhevsk and Yekaterinburg. Two years later, she released Spacetime, a six track odyssey that combines otherworldly incantations with homemade string instruments. Called “folktronic blues” by Marc Weidenbaum of disquiet, this project marked the first time she worked with audio engineer Rupert Clervaux, who mixed and mastered the tracks.

In August 2018, McNeal began Just Some Thoughts, a podcast that features interviews with Bay Area, California artists and makers. In January 2019, McNeal began Down The Rabbit Hole, a weekly web series based on Lewis Carroll’s classic tale, Alice in Wonderland. In June 2019, Marilyn began Earth:Connect, a new video documentary project.