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.