filmonik - tramp ahead + more
Another second Sunday, another Filmonik. Santiago took along Tramp Ahead which has already been mentioned here and was going to feature below but because of problems too irritating to get into has to be in QuickTime format which ain’t been done yet. It will get posted tomorrow, honest. But you’re probably not missing much, really very unhappy with it. Fortunately santiago’s friends Helen and Gary were on hand to save the day with excellent pieces. Gary’s was a kind of installation art piece, a digital recording of a Super 8 projection. Helen’s was my favourite piece of the night, a portrait of Dungeness, of aspects of her mother, and also of images and ideas that have cropped up through her work repeatedly. Ideally santiago would like to see both of them again, especially Helen’s piece so a more detailed critique can be featured here. At the time of writing neither Gary or Helen seem to have posted their films online or started threads for discussion on the filmonik website, but if you want to find links to other of the films that were shown and catch some of the debate then head over here.
There were some very professional productions with high quality images and sound, and skilled scripts, editing and performances. Unusually pretty much all the short narrative films were absolutely coherent and didn’t feel like they’d had the sense edited out of them. Even so there’s often something glib and unsatisfying about crafted narratives that follow a clear arc as opposed to more experimental work that explores ideas and relationships. This is where Helen and Gary’s pieces stepped in on Sunday. That said there were only two really questionable films on the night, one was a kind of horror film from a Kabaret event in Germany last year, and the other was a mad pro-gun polemic. The horror film was misogynist and incoherent, and only held together by its soundtrack. The mad polemic was almost funny. It was a documentary mainly consisting of an interview with a gun dealer, a voiceover outlining a variety of bizarre arguments, and video clips downloaded from YouTube. The chief argument in favour of guns appeared to be that people kill each other, commit suicide and have abortions without guns, so owning guns won’t make things any worse... or something.
And then there was Tramp Ahead to open the night, pulled out of the bag first while santiago was still at the bar. It was a fucking disaster. The sound was better than expected, and the editing of filmed road signs etc into a poem worked really well, but the quality of a lot of the film was pretty poor, and overall it wasn’t very coherent. However it could have been a lot worse, on Saturday it looked as though a whole lot of new filming and reshooting would have to be done. In the event an idea triggered by reading something in Vertigo sparked the idea of intertitles. So before heading out a bunch of sketches and words got written on the wall and some individual bricks in yellow chalk. It was going to be violet chalk but that was too dark. In the event that yellow chalk on red brick almost rescued the film and certainly made it a whole lot more integrated than would have been the case otherwise. It made it unnecessary to do any of the planned additional filming (which probably wouldn’t have helped any, had it been done). But that’s enough on that particular piece of shit.
On a happier note there’s been a lot of good music over the last couple of weeks. Flower-Corsano Duo’s The Radiant Mirror, Mastodon live at the Academy and The Soft Machine’s first couple of records.
Flower-Corsano have been covered fairly extensively here recently, but you really should give them a listen.
Mastodon was a night of weird contrasts. The support band, Saviours, were pure shite. A traditional metal twin-lead attack in the vein of Iron Maiden/Anthrax, boring Cro-Magnon drumming and nursery-rhyme tunes. Mastodon on the other hand may well be metal, but they have a grounding in hardcore and some very interesting and complex rhythms. Possibly not to most people’s taste but it was a great evening - even though people didn’t start crowd-surfing till the last song.
Then on the weekend bought the first two Soft Machine records on one CD - which had been an intention for a while. Great Jazz-influenced ‘psychedelia’. Again probably pretty divisive but tunes, experiment, songs, and pissing about in bite-sized chunks has got to worth trying if you like that sort of thing. If you like Syd Barrett then see what Soft Machine you can find online and check it out. Personally Volume One with Kevin Ayres still in the band is the more compelling of the two on the CD, but it’s all a matter of opinion.
Oh shit, there’s also been The Fall’s Reformation Post TLC. One review claimed it was the best since 1979, which is ridiculous and ignores everything from the 80’s. It’s certainly not better than those records, but it may be the best since about 89/90/91-ish. Although even since that period there’s been The Marshall Suite, Light User Syndrome, The Unutterable, …Country On The Click, and Fall Heads Roll. Reformation Post TLC has the meatiest sound in a while and carries echoes of Falls past (even circa Grotesque/Hex Enduction Hour) and their influences in the most obvious way for a long time. Can, Captain Beefheart, Amon Duul, and Velvet Underground are all either mentioned or echoed musically. And it’s a really relaxed–sounding record. We can probably draw a discreet veil over Das Boat – hell you can skip on to the next track people, it’s what technology’s for.
What do you say santiago tries to post some poetry soon? It’s about bloody time. Next time Tramp Ahead. Oh yeah, and santiago recently reached a thousand hits, another pretty cool milestone. See you soon.
There were some very professional productions with high quality images and sound, and skilled scripts, editing and performances. Unusually pretty much all the short narrative films were absolutely coherent and didn’t feel like they’d had the sense edited out of them. Even so there’s often something glib and unsatisfying about crafted narratives that follow a clear arc as opposed to more experimental work that explores ideas and relationships. This is where Helen and Gary’s pieces stepped in on Sunday. That said there were only two really questionable films on the night, one was a kind of horror film from a Kabaret event in Germany last year, and the other was a mad pro-gun polemic. The horror film was misogynist and incoherent, and only held together by its soundtrack. The mad polemic was almost funny. It was a documentary mainly consisting of an interview with a gun dealer, a voiceover outlining a variety of bizarre arguments, and video clips downloaded from YouTube. The chief argument in favour of guns appeared to be that people kill each other, commit suicide and have abortions without guns, so owning guns won’t make things any worse... or something.
And then there was Tramp Ahead to open the night, pulled out of the bag first while santiago was still at the bar. It was a fucking disaster. The sound was better than expected, and the editing of filmed road signs etc into a poem worked really well, but the quality of a lot of the film was pretty poor, and overall it wasn’t very coherent. However it could have been a lot worse, on Saturday it looked as though a whole lot of new filming and reshooting would have to be done. In the event an idea triggered by reading something in Vertigo sparked the idea of intertitles. So before heading out a bunch of sketches and words got written on the wall and some individual bricks in yellow chalk. It was going to be violet chalk but that was too dark. In the event that yellow chalk on red brick almost rescued the film and certainly made it a whole lot more integrated than would have been the case otherwise. It made it unnecessary to do any of the planned additional filming (which probably wouldn’t have helped any, had it been done). But that’s enough on that particular piece of shit.
On a happier note there’s been a lot of good music over the last couple of weeks. Flower-Corsano Duo’s The Radiant Mirror, Mastodon live at the Academy and The Soft Machine’s first couple of records.
Flower-Corsano have been covered fairly extensively here recently, but you really should give them a listen.
Mastodon was a night of weird contrasts. The support band, Saviours, were pure shite. A traditional metal twin-lead attack in the vein of Iron Maiden/Anthrax, boring Cro-Magnon drumming and nursery-rhyme tunes. Mastodon on the other hand may well be metal, but they have a grounding in hardcore and some very interesting and complex rhythms. Possibly not to most people’s taste but it was a great evening - even though people didn’t start crowd-surfing till the last song.
Then on the weekend bought the first two Soft Machine records on one CD - which had been an intention for a while. Great Jazz-influenced ‘psychedelia’. Again probably pretty divisive but tunes, experiment, songs, and pissing about in bite-sized chunks has got to worth trying if you like that sort of thing. If you like Syd Barrett then see what Soft Machine you can find online and check it out. Personally Volume One with Kevin Ayres still in the band is the more compelling of the two on the CD, but it’s all a matter of opinion.
Oh shit, there’s also been The Fall’s Reformation Post TLC. One review claimed it was the best since 1979, which is ridiculous and ignores everything from the 80’s. It’s certainly not better than those records, but it may be the best since about 89/90/91-ish. Although even since that period there’s been The Marshall Suite, Light User Syndrome, The Unutterable, …Country On The Click, and Fall Heads Roll. Reformation Post TLC has the meatiest sound in a while and carries echoes of Falls past (even circa Grotesque/Hex Enduction Hour) and their influences in the most obvious way for a long time. Can, Captain Beefheart, Amon Duul, and Velvet Underground are all either mentioned or echoed musically. And it’s a really relaxed–sounding record. We can probably draw a discreet veil over Das Boat – hell you can skip on to the next track people, it’s what technology’s for.
What do you say santiago tries to post some poetry soon? It’s about bloody time. Next time Tramp Ahead. Oh yeah, and santiago recently reached a thousand hits, another pretty cool milestone. See you soon.
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