Allow me to introduce you to a gifted, reclusive personality, and a unique man who creates amazing work over the years, and, despite everything he has already accomplished, never stops developing.
He told me that his greatest pleasure in life is “to be done.” I listened as he told stories about Manhattan's Gramercy Park, Eugene O'Neill and Charlie Chaplin's old stomping grounds. Then there was the time he met Björk Guðmundsdóttir, the Icelandic musician and avant-garde icon who has spent a career defying categories—blending electronic pop with classical grandeur, punk rebellion with intimate whispers, and technology with raw human emotion.
He answered my questions. All of them—except one.
His date of birth. That's OK with me.
Perhaps it is fitting that a man so devoted to creating would prefer that the work tell us who he is.
He lives in the Carolinas today, but New York remains close to his heart. The city, its characters, its history and its peculiar ability to transform ordinary streets into theatrical stages clearly remain part of his creative vocabulary.
And then there is the work.
Welcome to his Symphonic Films, where music and imagery merge into an immersive journey into the essence of a place, a moment and an encounter.
Wilson's orchestral compositions emerge from the emotions and observations born during his travels. The music becomes more than accompaniment. It becomes a living soundtrack—amplifying the beauty, mystery and sometimes the quiet strangeness of the world he encounters.
Each episode takes us somewhere.
Unique places. Artistic spaces. Forests. Small towns. Hidden museums. Roads and routes that connect places most people might otherwise pass without noticing.
The approach is cinematic vérité: real places, real moments, observed rather than manufactured.
The ordinary becomes cinematic.
The familiar becomes mysterious.
And the landscape becomes a character.
These online films are more than finished pieces. They are demonstrations of a larger artistic vision designed for HD broadcast, live performance, art exhibitions and gallery installations, incorporating graphics, selected 11-by-17-inch still photographs, original scores and soundtracks.
It is difficult to put Wilson neatly into a category.
Filmmaker? Composer? Photographer? Historian? Traveler? Visual artist? Why not all of them and then be done.
That may be precisely the point. His work occupies the space where art, music and real places meet.
And perhaps the most revealing thing he told me wasn't about New York, Björk, Chaplin or any of the remarkable people and places he has encountered.
It was that simple statement: His greatest pleasure in life is to be done. For someone who keeps creating, it sounds almost contradictory.
But maybe it isn't. Maybe “done” doesn't mean finished.
It is having taken an idea as far as he can take it, then letting it go.
The artist disappears. The work remains. And Mr. Wilson keeps moving.
Welcome to The Symphonic Films.
The Symphonic Films — Dall Wilson's YouTube channel
Dall Wilson is the kind of person who becomes more interesting the less he wants to explain himself. The refusal to give his birth date added to the portrait: the work matters; the biography doesn't.