River's Edge

Wonderful stuff from Lesley Hill and Helen Paris, taking a group of Stratford-Upon-Avon locals' stories of their relationship with their locality, and weaving a hallucinatory Tourist River Trip around them.

On board the boat, our tour guide quickly began to unravel in terms of her relationship to our locality, seeming to see Venice and the Nile where the Avon Rowing Club and a slightly foxed riverside restaurant stood. People on the riverbank began to further tear open the fabric of the screen between the audience, the stories and the 'real world' we had quite definitely left behind.

Curious' productions always seem very graceful in achieving these quite shocking shifts away from the comforts of the quotidian world, and the comforts of the audience seat; we are spirited to a disturbing Elsewhere but always in very good humour and fine style.

The production achieved the unlikely feat of transforming a sleepy stretch of the Avon into a re-enactment of Odysseus' life-and-death sail between Scylla and Charybdis, and of the always-arresting moment when characters appear of whose 'reality' we are genuinely unsure.

Excellent cocktail-pouring technique too, which we don't see nearly often enough, especially on a river boat that's about to run aground.

Repetitive Acts

Definitely not to be filed under "shows" or "entertainment". Sean H and I hit the arches under the Elephant and Castle mainline station last week for Craig Clouse (of Shit'n'Shine) to tweak, prod and interfere with a table full of tone generators and FX boxes to very similar effect achieved by S'n'S. Ugly wrenched bricks of rhythm, tortured every few bars into a new(ish) posture, and a continuous reel of 70s/80s hardcore penetration porno flickering on a white sheet where I guessed the bands usually play. It wasn't any old random porno either; each sequence had a glassy inevitability to it that only the most industrially mass-produced stuff would have, and Clouse had selected only close-up penetration of the most mind-bombed Workmanlike facial expressions. There were a very small handful of woman in the audience, and strangely the atmosphere was slightly less nasty as a result.

Die Munch Maschine (I'm not certain whether that 's' is really supposed to be there. I'm likely superimposing it to make my memories of the music appear more attuned to the group's sense of itself) did well to even find cultural space for themselves after Clouse, but a bracing sequence of nicely-fluctuating distorted Hammond motorik attacks, propelled by some outrageously far-flung drumming did the trick.

Tourist Trap

Even harder, this one. Even though it's technically a documentary, it looks like a 90 minute MTV gangster rap video- endless posturing, threats, platitudes, empty promises set against a relentlessly bleak stage of the grinding poverty of a shanty town. There's no sense of hope or community at all here, which makes for a deadening, empty movie.

The interjections of political and news footage is oddly natural; the stagey, cliches of network news reporting from a comfily distant warzone, the evasive pronouncements of the corrupted politician sit completely naturally with the ethically bankrupted aid worker and slurred moralising of the heroes.

By the end of the film, it's possible to see the threads of manipulation and advantage-taking that hold each take together.

City Of Tiny Lights

This is a properly difficult one.

It kept bringing to mind "Bus 174", a billiant, cold-eyed documentary about a compulsive, truly nerve-jangling horror-stricken hostage scenario in a bus in Rio de Janeiro. The documentary film that comes with the DVD of City of God is similarly gripping, unarguably real. "You might say it's not a job, but it is" says one guy about his life in the favela.

"City of God" itself is too awash with flashbacks, cheeky captions, crowd-pleasing music, self-consciously knockabout comedy, stagey changes in film stock, and lengthy chase scenes to build up real menace or engagement with "Rocket", the likeable kid who wants to be a photographer.

There are a few moments when it comes alive: Little Ze stalks the nightclub, genuinely out of control, needing to take revenge on any figure he can pin his rage on. In some ways, the film is too small for anything but this 18-year-old's volcanic anger, and in trying to capture another personal story or deliver an impression of a community the film simply gets too diluted.

The Gentle Art Of Keeping It Simple

The always-inspiring Union Chapel on Upper Street in Islington was our venue for John Hopkins and King Creosote, playing a jointly recorded LP venture.

As is my wont recently, I pitched up for this entirely on the strength of a general liking-the-idea of it, and the enthusiastic recommendations of Chris and Sean, who'd actually taking the trouble of listening to the songs beforehand so that I didn't have to.

This was incredibly fragile music, with none of the robustness of verse-chorus-verse, or anything you'd call a beat. The vocal melodies were almost choral in their repetitiveness and undemonstrativeness. Even when KC's content is ostensibly emotional, there's very little emoting about it.

The electronics-enthusiast in me kept hearing the empty spaces where the Hopkins bounce of joyfully complex techno would normally be; the longer the songs went on, the more apparent it became that this would overload the show with unnecessary musical detail. Hopkins ended up playing more of his upright piano that he did the computer.

Halfway through the show, Chris told me that the ambient sound at the start of the first track was the field recording of dinner-table talk at someone's house: clattering, indistinct chatter, room air and the sound-scape around a house. This immediately placed everything in an almost painfully-intimate domestic frame, and the Talking-Heads-esque restraint in how much each person on stage did made for a genuinely magical gig.

Baest Foot Forward

Our friends Baest were in sparkling form at an almost-cabaret bill in aid of a shamefully-forgotten charity at the Old Boy's Club near Gillett Square in Dalston a couple of weeks ago.

Dense sheets of guitar texture did that is-it-a-wave-or-is-it-a-particle? thing and kept the ebb and flow of the tracks running without ever really having to do anything as crass as sound like there was the hitting of a chord or picking an arpeggio.

There was an even denser world of Laptopiary; I was hearing the carefully-judged breakbeat techno of Finitribe and laser-guided pop dynamics of 'Technique' for the first track or 2, until the electronics and guitar began to speak to each-other properly and the sound became it's own.

Lovely stuff!

Dreams Come True

These two films, which I watched back-to-back today in an influenza haze, are both about sojourns in dream-spaces; both almost sermonizing in their lessons about the education of a more-or-less deliberate journey to a radically different reality. Both holiday films, more or less.

Stalker (on both watchings; I saw it, mesmerised, 3 years ago) has lost none of it's war-reporter power. Everything in the film is cracked, flooded, rotten, decayed, abandoned, broken, deserted. The dream-destination is alive with shards, a silent and oddly benevolent dog, crumbled objects, bird-sound, drips and splashes of unseen water, the occasion far-away train, leaving the complaints and dissatisfactions of the seekers-after all the more isolated and pathetic.

The breathing-in of the three men, particularly the Stalker himself, is raspy, laboured, shallow, a festival of effort and dried, cracked discomfort. Travelling toward something as undeniable and burdensome as everything-they-ever-truly-wanted at the centre of the Zone, the effort of speech is difficult to muster up. It's striking on a second watch, how little there is to say about the relationships between the three men, given that they spend more than 2 hours of screen time in the same, long shots together.

If Stalker is a film about desire and locality, then Spirited Away is it's sister movie about rite of passage and social locality. There are the apparently-obligatory ectoplasmic monsters and preposterous plot holes but a ghostly and hallucinatory visual imagination at work; the submerged train tracks, Kumajii's arachnid limbs, the almost nauseatingly plummy bath-token manager Aogaeru.

The theme of submerging as a transitory device is common to both; one of the few still, slow visual moments in Spirited Away that isn't ruined by truly dreadful American dubbed dialogue or brutal plot gear-changes is the over-the-sea train, it's tracks a couple of feet below the surface, station platforms rising out of the water like dreams of their own. Tarkovsky uses languid pans across detritus drowned in low pools, usually sunken tiled surfaces, mildewed and cracked, as staging posts within Stalker. His very-slightly-hokey loudly Oriental wind instrument is heard here too, signalling a respite from the brutal visitation of the unknowable within the spaces the men inhabit.

Both travellers come home, both to their families (weirdly after the passages they've endured), and neither seem likely to return.