Jamie XX Plays Live Accompaniment to Doug Aitken’s ‘Lightscape’ Show at the Shed in New York

Doug Aitken's "Lightscape," a film installation spread across seven screens, wrapped up its engagement this week at the Shed in New York, occupying the venue's 12,000-square-foot Darla Moore Gallery. The closing coincided with the arts center's yearly invite-only gala on Thursday evening, where Jamie XX delivered a live score synchronized to Aitken's moving imagery, merging music and visuals into a single immersive experience. Since its 2019 debut at Hudson Yards, the Shed has positioned itself as a leading presenter of cross-disciplinary commissions, and Aitken's project aligned closely with that curatorial identity.

Running 65 minutes, Aitken's film features an array of performers—among them Natasha Lyonne, Beck, and members of the Los Angeles Dance Project—moving through varied American settings that stretch from arid deserts and remote mountain terrain to manufacturing plants and highways. The imagery evokes a restrained, Wim Wenders-esque atmosphere, and although certain shots contain several people, they rarely interact. Speaking briefly with Variety after the event, Aitken said the piece, at its core, sought to channel the isolation and disconnection that mark so much of modern existence. A multidisciplinary artist whose large-scale works probe memory and perception—including "Sleepwalkers" at MoMA and "Mirage" in the California desert—Aitken has built a practice that, as critic Jerry Saltz once noted, operates less like conventional cinema and more like spaces audiences physically enter. That distinction helps explain why his pieces tend to be experienced as environments rather than watched as films, a quality that made the Shed's flexible gallery an especially fitting host.

While Jamie XX's solo output sits within electronic music, it routinely foregrounds melody to a degree uncommon among his contemporaries. For this performance, his score took a more atmospheric, less track-driven approach than his acclaimed 2024 album "In Waves," yet it preserved his trademarks: vivid layering of vocals and rhythms, along with sonic manipulations that attendees—free to chat near the console where he and his equipment produced the sound—could witness as they unfolded. The set closed with an unexpected selection: "Doot Doot," a subdued 1983 dance cut by the Welsh synth-pop outfit Freur, a group that counted two future members of Underworld and became a staple for new-wave DJs of the era. The choice highlighted Jamie XX's talent for rediscovering neglected recordings and giving them fresh relevance for today's listeners.

Across chosen summer evenings, the installation also played host to improvised live sets by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, William Basinski, Suzanne Ciani, and the Sun Ra Arkestra. Jamie told Variety that he and Aitken had invested months in developing the collaboration, and that the music for this particular show had been pre-recorded; whether it will ever be released, he said, remains undecided. Even so, the performance underscored his growing potential in film composition. Now that the Shed engagement has ended, the question is whether the Aitken–Jamie XX partnership will emerge again at a different venue or in some recorded form.