Part film screening and part industrial rock opera concert, BLACK LODGE is on the disturbing and complicated mythologies of the queer surrealist writer William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch). Created by David T Little and produced by Beth Morrison Projects. Black Lodge just had its World Premiere featuring glam opera band Timur & the Dime Museum alongside musicians from the Opera Philadelphia Orchestra at the Philadelphia Film Center.  It will make its streaming debut on Friday, Oct. 21, the Opera Philadelphia Channel.

This bold new work with a libretto by legendary poet Anne Waldman and story, screenplay, and direction by Michael Joseph McQuilken blends opera and rock into an alchemical exploration of magic, mystery, regret, and redemption.

Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer (Timur) faces down demons of his own making. Forced to confront the darkest moment in his life, he mines fractured and repressed memories for a way out. A woman (Jennifer Harrison Newman) is at the center of all the writer’s afterlife encounters. She is the subject of his life’s greatest regret, and she materializes everywhere in this Otherworld. The writer cannot detach any thoughts of his life from her.

The project is attracting attention throughout the music industry. Renowned musician Thurston Moore, known as a member of Sonic Youth, serves as executive producer of Black Lodge. “This is opera ripping through the fabric of future vision psychosis where the integrity of classic form clasps the hands of radical possibilities,” said Moore. “David T. Little takes no prisoners here, in confluence with poet angel head Anne Waldman’s libretto of nature, irreality, and spirit consciousness, divining deliverance from life’s spectacle of chaos and love. You’re about to have your mind scorched, my friends!“