Peter Conheim


Peter Conheim is a film and music archivist and multimedia artist who performs and records under the name The Jet Black Hair People. He is also the co-founder of Wet Gate, which uses only "found footage" and 16mm film projectors to create a live cinema collage performance, sampling the sound from the film tracks in real time, as well as Mono Pause, a long-running "situationist rock" performing group.
He is the lead archivist behind the streaming "culture 'zine" byNWR.com, for which he has restored some 15 feature films from original 35mm and 16mm source materials through his film preservation non-profit, Cinema Preservation Alliance. The films he has rescued and preserved have premiered since 2016 at such venues as the Berlinale, New York Film Festival, Morelia Film Festival and at Bologna, Italy's Cinema Ritrovato. Among the titles he has restored since 2016:
Additionally, he is a long-time member of the long-running "culture jamming" performance and recording group, Negativland, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The group's adventures with copyright are legendary, most notably a fight with U2's music publishers in 1992. Since 1999, he has been bass-playing sideman for singer Malcolm Mooney from the Germany-based music legends, Can, in Malcolm Mooney and the Tenth Planet. Since 2015, he has played bass with The Mutants, one of the first bands to emerge from the mid-1970s punk music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area.
He has numerous audio restoration, mastering and live recording credits through his Red Channels sound studio in El Cerrito. Projects over the years have included clients and artists such as:
As a film and video curator, he co-owned a single-screen cinema from 2004–2009 and continues to present shows in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, as well as engaging in or assisting various film preservation endeavours. He co-created the 2003 clip-based documentary, Value Added Cinema, and directed a 2005 short video observing Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin at work, Brand Impressions. He previously served on the Board of Directors of Canyon Cinema in San Francisco.