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.