Alan Clarke

The bulk of my film-watching this weekend was spent revisiting Blue Underground’s 2004 Alan Clarke Collection, a taster for the BFI’s huge Dissent & Disruption box due in May. Watching both versions of Scum in close succession, I think the BBC version wins out. The theatrical version is more abrasive, more violent, but the BBC film feels more raw, the brutalization of the young cast is harrowing to watch. The moment where a cherub-faced red headed boy laments being incarcerated so far from home is genuinely heart-breaking stuff. One interesting departure from the BBC version is the theatrical version’s elimination of Carlin’s “missus”, which was a good choice - it’s the one false note struck in the BBC version I think… Seeing Elephant again, without the shock and awe of that initial first screening, I felt the film’s lack of political context was more problematic than I first realized. The film’s sincerity is never in doubt but I wonder did Alan Clarke and his collaborators worry that the set-pieces, which are as stylish as anything Scorsese has ever filmed, might fetishize the violence for certain audiences (and the same could be said for The Firm). Either way, the Blue Underground set is knife-edge film-making at its most astonishing, and I am tremendously excited for the BFI set...

Ligeti

Classical music to play in the dark courtesy of György Ligeti’s 1967 composition Lontano. If the music sounds strangely familiar, you’re probably thinking of The Shining, a fragment of the music can be heard in the film (around the 2:33 mark of the clip) but the entire piece is worth listening to, those growling chords I’d wager were a big influence on James Horner’s score for Aliens. I’ve been looking at Ligeti credits on the imdb and I’m surprised to see how underused his music is in Cinema. Ligeti’s work lends itself quite readily to chillers like The Shining and Shutter Island, or films of mystery like 2001 or Eyes Wide Shut, but I particularly like Micheal Mann’s use of Ligeti’s Cello Concerto in his cops n’ robbers epic Heat, heard during the botched stakeout sequence. I suspect Michael Mann designed the sequence with this particular piece of music in mind, the opening moment, a wide aerial shot of a deserted nocturnal LA street seems to mimic the opening long line of the Cello Concerto. Ligeti’s extraordinary music is well represented on CD and if you’re game, I’d highly recommend the 5CD Ligeti Project which includes the Cello Concerto and Lontano.

Avant-Garde

More vintage vinyl porn I could never afford…. I’m currently reading The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross’ huge panorama of 20th century composition and by right I should be listening to Schoenberg and Stravinsky but I’ve jumped ahead half a century to indulge in Volume 1 of Deutsche Grammophon’s sprawling 1968 six-album Avantgarde set. Some major figures from the European vanguard are on this one, Penderecki, Stockhausen, Ligeti and Mauricio Kagel, and the music is as difficult as you would imagine, but always a thrill to hear Stockhausen take apart an orchestra and reassemble it as a free jazz unit. It’s a shame Deutsche Grammophon chose not to re-issue the series on CD - I was lucky enough to grab some very clean FLAC rips of the first 3 volumes from the much missed Wolf Fifth blog, but my preference would be to own the entire four part series (spanning 24 LPs) as a multi-CD boxset complete with the impenetrable liner notes. As with the great Prospective 21e Siècle series, DG's Avantgarde series is marooned on the collectible vinyl circuit and doesn't come cheap - an EX/NM copy of the set pictured below is currently for sale over at Discogs for €200...

Travels With My Camera

Last w/end I made a trip to Kilkenny in the Southeast of Ireland, and spent a nice afternoon visiting some local ruins, including Burnchurch Castle, a 15th century Norman tower with turret standing defensively alongside. A walled courtyard would have been attached to the tower but all signs of it has long since disappeared. Still, it's a treat to stand before two structures from the Middle Ages.

Slow fall inward... Evidently I haven't yet exorcised Jean Rollin's 1972 film The Iron Rose from my soul following a recent screening, and I couldn't let this forgotten graveyard go by without taking a few pics. Graveyards are wonderful, mysterious spaces to explore, and this one was particularly enchanting, having long since slipped into neglect, the headstones no longer curating the memory of their tenants due to weathering, the names and dates erased from the stone...

One eerie thing to report. While I was busy balancing my compositions, my wife called me over to a grave which had attached to the foot of the headstone, a large clump of black hair. On closer inspection it turned out to be hair cut from a child's doll but it sent a frisson thru us. We've seen enough Horror films to know that some mysteries best remain unsolved...

Analogue Paradise

Browsing thru Tod Dockstader’s discography earlier today I was looking at two volumes of Dockstader music issued on Keith Fullerton Whitman’s CD-R label Creel Pone and it put in mind another great vintage electronic release, Douglas Leedy’s mammoth 1971 album Entropical Paradise, a triple LP set containing "Six Sonic Environments created on the Moog Synthesizer and Buchla Modular Electronic Music System". I managed to listen to just four of those environments this afternoon before time ran out so another pass of the album is due tomorrow. I hasten to add that the image below is not my own, it was lifted from eBay - I have to make do with an mp3 rip of the album so I'm hoping this will make it's official CD debut at some point. The entire analogue bubblebath can be heard over at youtube or you can try here My favourite cut from the album is The Harmonarium, an incredible low-end drone that reminds me of the minimalist tones of Eleh and perhaps more fondly, Alan Splet and David Lynch's score for Eraserhead...

The sound of Quatermass

More Nigel Kneale musings on foot of yesterday’s Stone Tape post… This morning I’ve been listening to Tod Dockstader’s Quatermass LP, a suite of music the great American sound sculptor completed in 1964. In the liner notes of the Starkland re-issue, Dockstader admits that he hadn’t seen either of the first two Quatermass films at the time (referring to them under their US titles The Creeping Unknown and Enemy From Space) but Professor Bernard Quatermass’ name struck a chord and became the title of the suite. Still it’s a remarkably intuitive work, the album’s dark, ominous soundscapes would have been the perfect accompaniment to the films, so much so we might have been discussing Dockstader’s work in the same breath as Bebe and Louis Barron’s music for Forbidden Planet or Gil Mellé for The Andromeda Strain. As a remedy of sorts I’m planning on reading the four Quatermass books (Kneale’s original screenplays for the first three Quatermass installments plus the 1979 TV novelization) with Dockstader’s album as one of the reading soundtracks. I’d highly recommend curious listeners check out the 2012 Starkland CD which includes the album plus some additional recordings and in the meantime, you can download and listen to the original 46min album here

Listening to the Stone Tape

“This isn’t some little shade that couldn’t get into heaven because the pearly gates were shut. It’s something else, something interesting.” 

I re-visited The Stone Tape over the weekend and to supplement that screening I've just spent a very pleasant hour listening to Peter Strickland’s 2015 adaptation for radio. Fans of the 1972 television production will be pleased to hear that Strickland and his collaborator Matthew Graham have remained largely faithful to Nigel Kneale's original teleplay, apart from a few judicious tweaks, which is just as well because listeners can better immerse themselves in the radio play's extraordinary electronic sound design created by Broadcast's James Cargill and sound sculptor Andrew Liles. In fact the play will be something of a treat for experimental music devotees with nods to Alvin Lucier's signature electro-acoustic work I Am Sitting in a Room, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and a sly reference to the hauntological Focus Group. Neophytes might find Nigel Kneale's paranormal mysteries a puzzle at least on the first pass, so I would urge curious listeners to seek out the original BBC film first. Otherwise, find a quiet room, preferably a darkened one, and give this some generous volume. The radio play is not currently available through official channels so I've uploaded my mp3 copy here (a version is also available on youtube but it sounds rather shrill and lo-fi, so go for the mp3 instead).

The Golden Age of Psychic TV

One more Glitterbug related post... The footage of Psychic TV that appears in Derek Jarman's film, identified as "1984 Spanish Arts Programme" on the Arena broadcast, was filmed when the group appeared on La Edad de Oro (or The Golden Age), a television show that ran from 1983 to 1985 and featured some impressive acts. I previously posted about Tuxedomoon's terrific appearance in May '83 and Cabaret Voltaire's La Edad de Oro set is worth catching too if you're a fan of the Crackdown-era. Psychic TV's appearance on the show in 1984 captures the group at the peak of their power and it's quite remarkable to see the band granted such generous exposure, the broadcast complete with surreal, cabalistic visuals plus a dash of soft S&M. One couldn't imagine The Tube obliging. Youtube to the rescue again, some kind soul has uploaded 33mins worth of Psychic TV's performance here:

Glitterbug

Derek Jarman came up in conversation on these pages yesterday and with an hour to spare earlier I revisited the 1994 film Glitterbug, a fantastic 53min compendium of footage culled from Derek's Super 8 films. I first saw the film in March '94, just three weeks after Jarman's death when it was screened on BBC2 as part of the Arena series. The film was preceded by an interview with Jarman discussing his Super 8 work, but more crucially, the Arena broadcast included captions which identified some of the more substantial Super 8 fragments ("1972 Andrew Logan's Alternative Miss World competition" and so on). Unfortunately, these captions were omitted from Glitterbug's subsequent Raro and Artificial Eye DVD editions but I see the Arena broadcast has made it to youtube, complete with prologue and captions. Check it out here

top row left: filming Sebastiane in Sardinia, 1976,

top row right: footage from Marianne Faithfull promo Broken English, 1979

bottom row left: William Burroughs in London after filming a cameo appearance for Klaus Maeck's film Decoder, 1982

bottom row right: Throbbing Gristle at Heaven nightclub on 23rd December 1980, part of the T.G Psychic Rally In Heaven film

No New York

I watched Thurston Moore’s BBC punk rock documentary yesterday and there’s a definite sense of fatigue setting in at this point with the same tired war stories carted out - Pete Shelley recounts the making of the Spiral Scratch EP yet again, and matters aren't helped by the presence of the abominable Chrissie Hynde. A more interesting documentary could have been made about events across the Atlantic, at Manhattan’s No Wave scene and with that in mind, I’m currently listening to the 1978 Brian Eno-curated No New York album, two sides of ferocious out-there rock by James Chance & the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars and DNA. Wonderful stuff of course, the spikey angular rhythms of DNA and the eerie guitar tunings of Mars anticipate those great early Sonic Youth albums while the Contortions sound like a band playing within an inch of their life, and Lydia Lunch and the Jerks, the aural equivalent of a particularly disturbing slasher movie. No New York sounds as fresh as ever perhaps unlike Punk, the No Wave scene hasn’t been fodder for endless compilation albums, and given the scarcity of recordings by the groups featured, the album remains a vital document.