Another Time, Another Place

I've got a dreadful feeling they won't thank me for blogging about the work together, but there was some real commonality between the intense engagement with place of Stacey's Makishi's 'And The Stars Down So Close' soundtrack and installation in Newington Green, and Vicky Ryder's memoir of growing up with hair "as straight as the Coventry canal". The voices in Stacey's travelogue through N16 are constantly referencing the language of the shops, street names, bars, gas stations that the walk passes through. This allows her to jump on from the names of buildings to the names of her inspirations and fears: Steinbeck and the nameless watchers and spies who threaten the free-dreaming and free-associating of her protagonist. This sets up an endlessly dance between the footsteps along the real Islington streets (its bricks, its film crews, it's history), between its bollards and phone-boxes (not booths!) to steps into dangerous thoughts, an acknowledgement that there is  'one thing thing more dangerous than an introverted book, that's a girl who knows how to read them'. It's almost a disappointment when we reach Newington Green and find that Stacey has cast her glittering spell across the entire space, from the Belle Epoque patisserie to the Paradise Fish Bar.

The unseen voyeurs on Stacey's walk spy 2 girls, one female, and one identity unknown; I imagine this uncertain creature is a twin of the narrator of 'Ey Up and Away' and she grows up in a place suffused with sex and gender but that doesn't give (her) any reason to take sides. Sticky hair creams, the stench of canal-water, prickly clothes, quick-as-a-flash but deep-as-bone humiliations pile up page after page with only the cut-glass vignette form to keep the reader safe.

Digbeth Drama

Supersonic is again a brave festival proposition, removing the obvious rock and alternative crutches of the mass sing-a-long or worshipful archive grave-robbing, and relying on the hypnotick and primitive power of its forms to keep the audience from chin-stroking nerd-dom. We saw some properly cracking stuff, topped by Richard Dawson, an unprepossessing bearded Northerner, with a ululating wail of a voice and a tear-jerking way with a folk story. A gob-smacking sequence of key-changes as he worked his way through "Poor Old Horse" (a simple but affecting tale of the botched execution of aforementioned equine) were as powerful a musical device as we heard amid all the laptops and tone generators. His gag about being surrounded by the ghosts of various grandparents and pets, playing as his backing band, was the funniest thing we heard all weekend, outside of the dare-you-to-laugh "Black Star" refrain that Modified Toy Orchestra deployed.

There wasn't great deal of real onstage charisma if truth be told, though what there was, was electrifying. Jarboe, for me, has been a spectral presence known only from the "Burning World" Swans LP and the terrifying "Anhedoniac". She took the very simple but appallingly effective route of just standing onstage and singing the songs; with the eye-rolling and entranced delivery she has, this was more than enough to grip. There are matter-of-fact lyrical gestures towards barely-imaginable torment and heart-stopping devotion, which Jarboe can deliver like a public service announcement.

Rock is a tired and tiresome form, so needs something de-stabilising to jolt it beyond cheesy posturing (yes, Six Organs of Admittance, I'm talking about you). The babyish and fraught contortions of the Doomsday Student (bad name, good idea) vocalist was the only convincing rock stage incarnation of the weekend. He gibbered, plucked, arched, grasped and groped while the band delivered a harsh traumatised punk rock, knowingly stylised and sleekly aerodynamic.

The finale was well-chosen by the curators; I only know Oxbow from barely-comprehensible inky reports of muscular performative confrontation. On this evidence, they've had criminally poor coverage: a stark and rhythmic string section gives the declamatory and distressed vocal plenty of room to manoevre, the gasps and guttural groans in the delivery all too close for comfort.

Camera Angle

These are two gloriously cinematic films, that certainly wouldn't have justice done to them on a television screen. Andrea Arnold puts an astonishing weather-beaten array of natural greens, greys and russets into the frame, and even squares off the frame itself to heighten the sense of claustrophobia and to avoid opening up the film to an easily-delivered vista-of-nature. Her camera follows Heathcliff from beating to hillside to stable, punctuating the barely-imaginable journey Arnold charts for him, from act of charity, to dark obverse, to return of the repressed, with sudden, harsh, raw panoramas.

It was a crying shame that a gruesome pluck-fest of a track by Mumford and Sons was allowed to spray itself over the final few frames and reduce my memory of parts of the film to nothing better than an impressionistic folk music video styled by Toast's Moorland Farm aesthetic.

Lynne Ramsay (maker of the glorious Morvern Callar)

Baest Beats That

Baest were once again entrancing and categorically slippery at the Club Surya gig last week.
There are frequent very gentle eruptions of Persian-carpet noise and clattering thickets of percussion that lunge towards us and then scatter like startled gazelles. The tracks take the form of impressionistic live-action watercolours in deep and awkward colours: Acid Stomp, Electro Noise, and Disassembled Dance. Constantly and colourfully unclassifiable stuff.

Tanked

We  saw Hito Steyerl, a Berlin based filmmaker, and Rabih Mroue, a Lebanese artist, at the Tate Modern last night. Their double handed lecture was set in one of the chilly Tank galleries, a raw and almost refridgerated space built out of the previously derelict storage vats for power station oil. A very late start, unimaginative powerpoints and a 90-minute duration were challenges that my attention span was not up to meeting, unfortunately.

The essential ideas were very interesting: What happens or has happened when there is ‘remaining’ probability, after all the imaginable events have had their likelihood taken account of? Is there a space where all the impossible people or statements are able to exist? Steyerl and Mroue use some sleight of hand with storytelling, probability theory and film editing to open this spatiality, without every completely convincing.

They are both very engaging performers and artists (we particularly enjoyed Mroue’s “Pixelated Revolution” at dOCUMENTA, featuring his quietly impassioned and clear-eyed commentary on mobile-phone footage of police and army brutality, in which the user of the phone is shot while filming), but perhaps needed a collaborator with a more pedagogical style; the overall effect was of a presentation to the Tate curators for ideas for a project that had not yet been fleshed out.

All Eyes On Korea

Jang Gyeong Kyu and the "Be Being" group were an entrancing proposition at the Purcell Room as part of the 'All Eyes on Korea' festival staged under the auspices of the 대한민국 문화원. A spectrum of strings, reeds, guitars a d percussion all contributed to a soundscape and melodic vocabulary that was never cluttered, though rasping and heavily textured, and delicately rhythmic. The discipline and restraint of the players was properly thrilling, and every element was tested and allowed to give an account of itself without being hurried on by an approaching chorus or ensemble flourish. It was a real treat to hear players asking eachother as many musical questions as they were playing 'together' in any obvious way.

Tomorrow's World

Akira envisions the futuristic city through the retro-active means of the cartoon, while Alphaville does a perversely better job with the even more dated technologies of the effects-free noir gumshoe caper.

I don't speak any Japanese, but I can't imagine that the original dialogue is as breathlessly juvenile and hackneyed as the Americanised English that completely pulls the rug out from under any attempt at character development in Akira, and fragments the movie into one preposterously over-wrought and context-empty confrontation after another. There are some jaw-dropping visual tours-de-force, and the city is consistently affect-less and empty of anyone but helplessly crushed, eviscerated and torched populations. Adults are bumptious pawns; ageless, gnomic infants rule.

Alphaville is a wet, dark, oily place, punctuated with pristine white institutional interiors. The talk is laconic, bone-dry, hard-board; the characters believing so effortlessly in their own unreality that they need no sturm und drang to keep themselves powered. The most intensely present being in the film is undoubtedly the voice of Alpha 60, always answering back and demanding of the increasingly frantic private detective.

The future is harder to believe in, the brighter it gets.

Kila "Soisin"

This is a very lovely instrumental folk record, apparently taking its inspiration from the memoir of an Irishwoman who became a Buddhist saint. The tunes are slowly rolling, plaintively repetitive melodies, drifting one into the next.
Theremin, strings, flutes, undemonstrative guitar and gradually unfolding flurries percussion are the simple ingredients that crucially don't get over exposed or overproduced in anything as crass as a solo.
None of the pieces are in any kind of hurry to get anywhere and all the more limpidly beautiful for that; "Cluainin" particularly takes most of its duration to get to its melodic point and still doesn't feel as if it is wasting any time.
The element of the music that struck me the most was how much in common it has with some of the North African and Korean 'traditional' music I've been listening to. The texture of stringed instruments, the emphasis on bowing, the intense attention to establishing melodic logic before pace or repetition become an issue. Evocative and heart-worn stuff.

Drivin' You Home

These three groups showed us just how difficult it can be to marry lyricism with a sense of adventure and a musical space that allows for the song to flow to its own internal logic. Dead Rat Orchestra start up with some pugnacious and shambolic bass drum and violin rollickings, but begin to create something interesting when they spark up a pump organ, let a mournful violin play a tune very, very slowly, and then begin dropping hundreds of metal hexagonal coins onto the concrete floor of Cafe Oto, setting up a constant drone of chiming static, before destroying a large log of wood with hatchets to provide a rhythmic setting for a medieval-sounding intonation. 

Duke Garwood is an absolute revelation, conjuring a drunken jazz-blues out of his guitar, and decorating it with slurred simplicities: "I'm gonna drive you home, cos you're all alone", and never saying or playing anything for longer than is necessary to bring his character to life, at which point he stops the song and lets the character become another ghost; crowds of them populate the room by the time he's done.

Wooden Wand is a wonderful songwriter, but his observational and florid lyrical style and "read-about-it-in-a-book" subject matter keeps him from truly casting a spell. 

Come to Daddy

This is film for long-time observers of the 'Alien' series and its sometimes- astounding engagement with motherhood, other-hood, family ties, and the urge to destroy. I can't see it interesting anyone else apart from fans of retro-futurist spacewear and Dr-Who standard plot development. Scott presumably had a monster budget for this, and he certainly put the money on the screen; it's a real shame there was none left to hire decent scriptwriters (some of the dialogue is unforgivably hammy, and falls very flat without the (absent) character and relationship development that would have given it some meaning). Idris Elba is completely wasted as a rough-but-likeable ship captain; Michael Fassbender does his best with the robot but some of the humans around him are so unconvincing that he ends up looking awkward and artificial anyway; Charlize Theron equally manages woman-fully with a character so vacuous she could be written out of the movie and it would have made no difference at all. I ended up not caring who the Prometheans were or  how they had fallen foul of the Alien.

Look, Mom, No Rehearsal

This was a splendidly uneven, jerkily edited version available on DVD, apparently with large elements of the original Mingus score missing. Even so, it's a gripping, uneasy, naked psychodrama of a film, taking in a series of scrubby interiors (living room, bar, basement club, alleyway), none shot so as to make their environs any sort of character. We follow a nightclub singer, his engaging manager, a trumpeter of his entourage,  and various wideboys and hangers-on through a handful of parties, off-hand and distracted exchanges, and through a compulsive central meeting in which a white peripheral scenester, plainly out of his depth with a Nefertiti-esque girl, referred to as 'sister' by the singer, obviously responds badly to the black characters who return to her apartment and interrupt his doe-eyed seduction attempt. It's visceral and  demanding stuff, only finding some light relief with the sparkling repartee between thensinger and his cajoling, reassuring, long-suffering manager. The jazz that remains on the lumpy soundtrack is suitably ghostly, demi-evolved and convulsive.  

Songs Un-Shaped

We heard two gloriously variegated takes on guitar melodicism here at Cafe Oto the other week. Steffen Basho Junghans was almost piratical in his demeanour and the slant of one of his eyebrows, but evoked dust-bowls, jagged and disjointed landscapes with much of his playing. The best element of his set wasn't any of the actual guitar scrapes, strums and scratches that he wove together in each piece, but the almost teasing sense of dynamic to the sequence of the tunes; he began with one of the most challenging for the listener, as if to situate everyone's ears as far as possible from a straightforward point of departure. Every set of open chords was pushed to its limit and scuffed up 'til all of its weaknesses was exposed. The final part of the set began to sound almost lyrical, coming to the language as from a very long way away, and having no truck with naivete despite a very plain melody.

Kim Doo Soo's were extremely rich, finely constructed confections of lyrical schmaltz and restrained but busy folk guitar, taking great care with each melodic shift and each change of counterpoint relationship between the voice and strings. His extremely plain performing style, subsuming no facial histrionics but a very politely mannered and doleful vocal strategy did him huge favours in coming across cohesively. 

Tightrope dancing

DV8 created an astounding dance-docudrama, involving interviews from both media archives and some originally created, spoken aloud by the dancers. The entire show is a sequence of tours de force: The arts and culture editor of a Dutch newspaper gives a statement while zipping up his trousers upside down; 2 men appear to float backwards and forwards across the stage while recreating a particularly fractious radio encounter between the Muslim Council of Great Britain and Al Muhajiroun; a genuinely weird skipping or hardcore rave style predominated the sequences in which several male dancers delivered joint statements. This gave the rhythm a British sense, as did the brilliantly convincing drab institutionalism of the faux parquet flooring and stained, faded beige pain on the walls.

An exceptionally brave call for freedom of speech and the erasing of threats of violence from public debate.

Flavour 'n' Texture

We were at Cafe Oto last night for a trio of noisescapes from Daniel Mensche, BJ Nilsen and Oren Ambarchi.

These performances all went to demonstrate an important fact. Performance is a slippery way of living on a stage, and letting that particular eel out of the plastic bag means an artist is suddenly exposed to any amount of critical perspective and questions about their relation to a performance history and a relationship with their audience that their physicality simply isn't configured to engage with.

BJ Nilsen is a bald man sat behind a laptop, which he concentrates intensely on for the duration. He could just as easily be at home, and we could even more easily be listening to a live podcast. However, he simply doesn't even gesture toward anything that'd be called performing, engaging physically, still less "rocking". The sounds are pointillistically detailed, constantly rearing up against the clunk of drinks, Dalston police sirens outside, offering icy scapes, almost-human choir-gasps, elegaic drones and loudly empty atmospheric recordings that he wonderfully corrals and coaxes into some tumbling momentum.

Oren Ambarchi has a table-ful of old skool effects boxes and mixers, and sits with a guitar, whose strings are held and stretched to extract a sequence of harsh, almost pump-organ noises; we enjoy the obsessively controlling and adjusting, as if he is having to engage with a ill-tempered group of sensitive individuals to make the noise he needs.

Daniel Mensche, meanwhile, yells, underlights himself, and contorts with some sort of contact-miked plank, delivering only the most rudimentary and lumpen sound while drawing attention wisely away from it by squatting on his haunches on a table for the duration of the set. Noise yields its secrets the more we listen to it to the exclusion of all else; a guy hooting and preening on a desk is not what we need to get there.

Ideas on the Page

This was a curiously indigestible ICA talk, that turned out to be a progress report on the speaker's PhD thesis.

There was a dusty, mimeographed'n'stapled tone to the whole presentation, as the actual art reference points were almost entirely focused on East Coast American art of the late 60s; artists were realising that there was a vast newly constituted cultural space, only just beginning to be mediatised, which was almost completely naive as far as aesthetics went.

As as result, work was being made to 'infiltrate' the magazine and commercial publishing sectors which was either vacuous outside the fact of infiltration (Dan Graham), or reduced to arch and impenetrable game-playing within the micro-monde of the poetry journal (Vito Acconci). We would have been much more engaged with a critical analysis of the contribution of this work, and a less America-centric world-view, rather than a defensive account of how personal loyalties and old-boy-network got some of these artists space to publish in.

http://www.ica.org.uk/?lid=31848

Urban Re-development

Two very different elements of the past come back to haunt the modern Korean urban present in these two movies. The Gingko Bed, which is eventually buried under the weight of its own CGI conceits, preposterous medical-establishment shenanigans and portentous acting, begins from the charming-enough premise that the spirits of two medieval forbidden-lovers are imprisoned in the wood of a bed made from a Gingko tree. The vengeful General Hwang, who pursues them through modern Seoul is strictly cartoon-time though.

Green Fish, on the other hand, has its audience more reflectively respectful and doubtful of the position of traditional, localised, family-centred Korean society, in the form of 막동의 (Mak Dong's) riotous, sometimes charmless, permanently struggling family in 일산 (Ilsan), while huge new apartment blocks begin to dominate the horizon of what was recently a market and farming town outside Seoul.

After his (never seen) break in the army, Mak Dong returns home and drifts inexorably and quickly away from his family toward the brutal big city nightclub'n'property underworld. The brilliantly and prosaically staged petty violences and resentments of this demimonde (including the wonderful 송 간호 (Song Kang-Ho) as a more natural but charmless gang lieutenant) never seem to convince him, and Mak Dong's traumatic attempted return to his family is a quietly devastating piece of cinema.

Speaking Up

This is a piece of pure, that is to say completely artificial and magical, cinema. It's a simple enough tale of silent movie star finding that technology and the studio system have discarded him, and his redemption at the hands of the young and hugely successful actress he'd given her first break.

What elevates it far and away above cutesy and 'lovingly made' is it's faith in its own material. Most of it is completely silent of dialogue, and time that facial expression and reflection need to deliver their message is ladled on in generous doses.

I think that the next time I see a film with talking in it, I'll be a little distracted.

No Sex Please, we're Addicts

It is a good thing that McQueen's visual sense is viscerally watchable, even when his set is a greyly minimal marketing agency office, or Fassbender's refrigerator of a high-spec apartment. It's also a very good thing that Fassbender is electrifying, even (or especially) in the most mundane elements of his compulsive masturbation.

The film needs both these elements quite badly, as it doesn't make a case for the central male character at all. He has a very highly paid job in what appears to be advertising, but never does anything remotely convincing. He has a colossal quantity of porn stashed on his PC at work, and seems surprised when he's caught. He compulsively watches porn on his laptop at home, and is an enthusiastic and loyal customer of many local prostitutes, but is introduced to us as a man with a supernaturally powerful sexual magnetism for attractive women. Toward the end of the film, we understand he is in a state of horrifying sexual need, but are expected to believe he would visit a gay club for a blow-job. Libidinally he's simply not believable, and the cliff-hanger of an is-he-redeemed-or-not finale, doesn't seem like the question the audience has been asked throughout.

Having said that, the genuinely disturbing expression on his face as he fucks the final in a sequences of prostitutes near the end of the film, like an athlete who's destroyed his metabolism with steroids just to keep competing, and is realising he's left it far too late to stop, is worth the psychological jigsaw-mix -up of his character.

Un-English Landscapes

The main ingredient in these pictures is actually the spaces in them. Not so as you would notice, what with all the lightning, Biblical downfalls, spectral and colossal architecture, weather patterns seen on no terrestrial satellite, dwarfed human figures minutely picked out but hopelessly lost in the Sturm Und Drang of the righteously erupting geology all about.

What actually held my attention was the almost vertigo-inducing sense of cold, uninhabitable air between the viewpoint and always hopelessly distant action.

Foreground and Background

I only found out about "Khamosh Pani" (or "Silent Waters") through a colleague of Dr Roshini Kempadoo's, who mentioned the film in passing, while talking about his PhD research into the memories of partition as expressed in those who lived through them, and the cultural artifacts informed by the traumatic end of British imperial rule in India and the newly constituted Pakistan in 1947.

It's a gloriously humane film, taking on explosive elements of political history but succeeding in keeping a local frame around the narrative, and our sympathies with the female characters from the town. It's no coincidence that while the male characters are very morally active and noisy, it is within Ayesha's story and gravity within the plot of the film, that the ethical questions are asked and dramatised.

It's never actually occurred to me that I should be careful in this blog not to give away the endings of films or books; or at least that I should post a 'spoiler alert' if I'm doing more than reviewing- which is what I have been assuming I was doing most of the time.

One of the elements within 'Silent Water' that keeps the political and religious posturing, and our own reactions to it, from overwhelming the very understated story-line (Sikh brother returns to home town in Pakistan, half-aware that his sister might have escaped the filicidal and uxoricidal end of his family when the town was annexed by newly arrived Muslims), is the very pungent and textual attention to local domestic detail, fingers wiping rice and chapati from plates, Ayesha's careful sifting of grain in a large dish whenever she is thinking events over, the sympathetic street-shots, and the un-dressy interiors of bed, mat, picture and bowl.

This, and some of the same gender economy, is what links a small town near Rawalpindi in Pakistan with Incheon, the port and airport satellite city of Seoul in South Korea, where "고야이를 부탁해" (or "Look After My Cat") is set. Here too, the domestic interiors, cafes, tube-line landscapes are left to speak for themselves for long intervals, in a movie whose 3 main characters are girls in their first year out of high school, variously finding the route into womanhood an uncertain one. The urban and sub-urban journey-ings of the characters through the film take a good part of the place of dialogue between them, giving the film a rather beautiful and elliptical rhythm.

The unforgiving economics of a rapidly post-industrializing South Korea are dramatised quietly in the responses of Tae Hee, Hae Joo abd Ji Young to the sudden gulfs between them once school is over, (By far the noisiest and liveliest moment of the film is the first one, in which the girls wildly celebrate then end of their final school day, on the docks at Incheon with a camera), just as the equally relentless politico-religious logic of the re-formation of Pakistan's identity becomes the fuel for the drama of 'Silent Water'.