"Steel Water Light is a musical project based around silent movies about cities at the beginning of the century bridges, trains, skyscrapers, harbours compared with our feelings about cities now, at the beginning of the new Century. It's a scratchwork of different ideas about cities mechanical sounds, human sounds, ethnic sounds. Even if a city is a mixture of music, often it is sadly silent. Because the people who live in it are sadly silent". Roberto Musci

Anyone who has heard Roberto Musci's two classic releases on ReR, with erstwhile collaborator Giovanni Venosta, will be anxious to catch up with his recent work. If the Musci/Venosta records were about a wonderful method of integrating ethnic field recordings with live playing, the focus here has shifted to the sounds of the industrialised West, and the formation of an ensemble which performs live music to films. The score straddles genres, running the gamut between composed, improvised, graphic, atmospheric and avant garde movie soundtrack. The films were three silent black and white classics: Joris Iven's De Brug (1928) and Regen (1929), and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921). They deal with a level of abstraction that was pioneering for documentary film making at that time.

Roberto Musci provides the sample's robot voices, strange looping backwards melodies, crazy voices from innumerable forgotten movies; Jon Rose hits a peak of improv violin virtuosity; Chris Cutler spatters the textures with electronically processed drums and percussion; and Claudio Gabbiano interjects with restrained electric guitar phrases.

The live score has been re-edited as a purely listening experience.

The performances took place in a huge glass palace, as part of a festival of silent movies with live soundtracks, on December 10th, 1999 at Palazzina Liberty, as part of the SenzaParole Festival, Milan.