released 14th September 2026
The Hotel is honoured to present Passage Through: A Ritual, Philip Corner’s soundtrack to Stan Brakhage’s 1990 film of the same name.
After seeing Brakhage’s The Riddle of Lumen one evening at Anthology Film Archives, Philip Corner went home and, struck by a rush of divine inspiration, started playing the piano into the night.
Corner recorded a tape around Francois Couperin’s ‘Les Barricades Mysteriouse’, a piece he improvised daily as a private spiritual meditation, as Corner was convinced that no other piece until Erik Satie’s Vexations “led the breakthrough from material consciousness to enlightenment”. Corner sent this tape to Brakhage, who in turn was so moved that he immediately asked Philip if he could ‘set it to film’.
The result is Passage Through: A Ritual. Not only an extreme anomaly in both Corner and Brakhage’s oeuvres but undoubtedly one of the most singular works of art ever created by humankind.
A film which consists almost entirely of a black screen, dominated by the impotence of Corner's piano soundtrack. Brakhage offers us only a handful of moments of vision throughout its 50-minute runtime – or in Joshua Minsoo Kim’s words, “a chance at sight”.
This edition in The Hotel marks not only the first time the soundtrack is widely available to the public, but offers an entirely new way of perceiving the work.
The LP holds the full unedited soundtrack to the film, whilst the accompanying booklet contains an essay by Joshua Minsoo Kim and frames from the film, recreating the sense of motion and ‘passage’ which Brakhage intended, with flickers of vision miraculously emerging out of deep blackness into the light.
credits
Performed and recorded by Philip Corner, 27th January 1990
Soundtrack to the film by Stan Brakhage
Tape transfer by John Polito at Audiomechanics, LA
Courtesy of the Academy Film Archive
with thanks to Mark Toscano
Mastered by Sean Mccann
Artwork by Stan Brakhage
Courtesy of the Stan Brakhage Estate
Design by Jon Wozencroft
Executive produced by Henry Cyer
The Hotel
TH07, 2026