PETER LIECHTI KICK THAT HABIT (1989)

Director: Peter Liechti

Year: 1989

Time: 40 mins

Music: Voice Crack with Knut Remond

Eye of Sound: Legendary "cracked everyday electronics" Swiss duo Voice Crack created a nook of their own in the rich panorama of European adventurous music in the 80s. Exploring the debris of industrial culture, the duo refined an improvisation language and method based on the literal deconstruction of everyday materials, releasing ghosts from vulgar machines and objects till their disband in the 21st century. Composed in the noble tradition of sound-film, Peter Liechti's Kick That Habit is a beautiful, grainy, wordless documentary on Crack methods, performances and, appropriately enough, everyday sonic surroundings. The way in which Liechti allows common aural experience surrounding the duo to breathe throughout the film, alternating footage of private performances and common "real life" events, is a fundamental aesthetic strategy and accounts for much of its immersive and contemplative, quiet force: finely amplified banal events, like the cracking of an egg at a restaurant, are located within the same experiential dimension of the duo's experiments with a long thin wire - and perhaps in a more fundamental way than classic concrète tactics. Liechti's amplified realism prevents him from indulging in conventional illustrative plays with sound-image dislocations, so that the chosen soundtrack for the duo's train travels is not the duo's recorded music but the duo's train travels. Kick that Habit resounds as an immersive experience in cracked everyday industrial soundscapes, as if sound has been, like in some early experiences already shared here, scratched onto the film. That would probably be the finest way - the only sane one - to make a documentary on Voice Crack. But Kick that Habit is not really a "band documentary". It is rather a documentary on sound itself.

KICK THAT HABIT