The Sound of Eye

PIERRE HÉBERT THE TECHNOLOGY OF TEARS (2005)

2010-12-11T12:21:00.000-08:00

Director: Pierre Hébert

Year: 2005

Time: 14 mins

Music

Fred Frith

Tenko & John Zorn

Eye of Sound: Fred Frith once lamented that the dancers for Rosalind Newman's 1987 choreography The Technology of Tears complained about the music he had written for the piece: it was thought to be too rigid and mechanical for the fluidity of movements the dancers aimed at. Nevertheless, Frith's homonymous piece survived its original setting as one of his most beautiful scores, presenting an uncanny blend of musicianship, rhythmical accent, virtuosity, timbrical vigour, and emotional spunk that distinguishes it from most of its contemporaries. It was perhaps as an act of justice that Pierre Hébert decided to revisit Technology, for which he had designed the video sections (and the LP cover) and offer an overtly choreographed reinterpretation of the piece, one in which the fluidity of movements does not seem hindered by the invasive pulse of Frith's score. This decision was all the more justified as the project was originally conceived as an intimate collaboration between the three artists, in which the three artists would make their contributions evolve along with the others' and none would be condemned to be foreground or a mere scenic servant of the remaining elements. Hébert's Technology uses animations produced much later "to fill in the black hole in the continuity that had served the scenography for the dance piece", not being, therefore, a simple transposition of the choreography into animated drawings. For some sections, Hébert had Newman repeat the main solo dance of the piece in a studio and repeatedly drew it on film (as he often does in live performances), creating a visual "explosion of the solo itself" by means of a technique that bears the obvious influence of Len Lye, quoted by Hébert as the founding father of the relationship between animation and body movement.

THE TECHNOLOGY OF TEARS

DEREK BAILEY & EVAN PARKER LIVE INCUS FESTIVAL 22.04.1985

2010-12-09T16:46:00.000-08:00

Year: 1985

Time: 48 mins

Music: Derek Bailey & Evan Parker

Eye of Sound: To conclude our Incus '85 concert series, Evan Parker takes a seat with Derek Bailey for an extended duo session. A dialogue in which both interlocutors listen to each other and a rare opportunity to see these two gentlemen play together.

DEREK BAILEY & EVAN PARKER 1985

DEREK BAILEY LIVE INCUS FESTIVAL 22.04.1985

2010-12-08T16:15:00.000-08:00

Year: 1985

Time: 22 mins

Music: Derek Bailey

Eye of Sound: Just before Parker's solo performance posted below, Mr. Derek Bailey opened the concert with an impressive session, now with amplified guitar and pedal. If you ask me, it's always the blues. The final section, joining Parker and Bailey on stage, will be posted soon.

DEREK BAILEY 22.04.1985

EVAN PARKER LIVE INCUS FESTIVAL 22.04.1985

2010-12-07T17:25:00.000-08:00

Year: 1985

Time: 30 mins

Music: Evan Parker

Eye of Sound: In 1985 the legendary Incus label hosted a concert featuring Derek Bailey and Evan Parker, first playing solo and then as a duo. This is the Evan Parker solo set, with tenor and soprano saxophones, at a time when he was refining his circular breathing technique. The remaining sections will be posted in the next few days.

EVAN PARKER 22.04.1985

ERKKI KURENNIEMI ELECTRONICS IN THE WORLD OF TOMORROW (1964)

2010-11-27T16:35:00.000-08:00

Director: Erkki Kurenniemi

Year: 1964

Time: 5 mins

Music: Erkki Kurenniemi

Eye of Sound: Erkki Kurenniemi was arguably one of the first artists to propose or fantasise about a complete cultural surrender to cyber existence, and his entire career, covering such diverse fields as artificial intelligence, music, engineering, film, dance or rhetorics, testifies to this desire to escape the limits of the human body and transgress into a different dimension, bordering on techno-fetishism. In his 1964 short Electronics in the World of Tomorrow, Kurenniemi presents a slideshow of the most aseptic signs of technological imagination: diagrams, chips, machines, cold surfaces. But footage of human warmth also comes up - mostly in black and white, as if to give humans the status of a memory. Originally silent, the film was in this version endowed with a electronic music piece by Kurenneimi himself: a cold, aggressive soundtrack that could be said to present technology as a potentially menacing affair, although this is a reading that the director would certainly refute.

ELECTRONICS IN THE WORLD OF TOMORROW

COIL COLOUR SOUND OBLIVION I: LIVE IN LONDON 24.08.83

2010-11-25T21:36:00.000-08:00

Camera: Cerith Wyn-Evans

Year: 1983

Time: 24 mins

Music: Peter Christopherson

Eye of Sound: To celebrate the news of Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson's demise yesterday, a recording of Coil's performance at the Air Gallery in London in 1983. Entitled A Slow Fade to Total Transparency (How To Destroy Angels), it features John Gosling, John Balance and Marc Almond, while Christopherson provides the sound input on tapes. Samples from Pasolini's Salò set the tone for Almond's reading of a bitter-violent text apparently addressed to an ex-lover and for Balance's and Gosling's disturbing ritual of self-mutilation. As an esoteric ritual performance, the procedures elude the understanding of the non-initiate, and, much like in TPY's First Transmissions act, we are only allowed to know that it is located at the intersection of pain, sacrifice, control, art and magic. If the abundance of blood, smear and dejects is reminiscent of Muehl and the Aktionist posse, the slow, pseudo-ritualized gestures of the performers lend it a different, possibly more deranging effect, and certainly carry a different signification for the artists and their followers.

COLOUR SOUND OBLIVION I

PATRICK BOKANOWSKI THE WOMAN WHO POWDERS HERSELF (1972)

2010-11-22T19:48:00.000-08:00

Director: Patrick Bokanowski

Year: 1972

Time: 16 mins

Music: Michèle Bokanowski

Eye of Sound: A woman powdering herself, while someone who seems to incarnate death patiently observes her, is probably one of the few immediately intelligible scenes in Bokanowki's 1972 debut film. She wears a mask that apparently hides the blisters covering the faces around her and, by powdering herself, she seems to entice the march of another creature who is later seen to attack a woman, perhaps the powdered woman, with the help of a raging mob. The film's narrative is cryptic enough to have elicited all sorts of exegetical discoveries: from discourses on beauty, masks and the objectification of desire to comments on the French Revolution, critics seem to have found different keys to the mystery of La Femme. In fact, the film's baffling combination of expressive action and onirical sequence should perhaps make us weary of the attempt to locate linear narration units in it. It is tempting to say that La Femme, Bokanowski's first short, contains all the elements that would the director would mature in the following decades: opaque screen compositions are loaded with painted superpositions, although the result here sometimes verges on a tribute to expressionism; the sometimes imperceptible slow gestures are familiar to admirers of L'Ange, while the run across the fields is thematically reminiscent of Déjeuner; and, above all, the deformity of objects and plans, associated with a perverse use of light and shadow contours, enhances the opacity of the images. Michèle Bokanowski, the director's wife and lifetime collaborator, offers a beautiful, if somewhat cold and deranging, electroacoustic soundtrack that punctuates, through its contrasting modes, La Femme in oblique ways: although woven into the film, the composer's score is delicately synched with the screen in telescopic ways, compounding moments rather than providing, as usual, a steady throbbing cadence.

LA FEMME QUI SE POUDRE

MUSTAFA EMEK GÜL FOE (2007)

2010-11-21T16:35:00.000-08:00

Director: Mustafa Emek Gül

Year: 2007

Time: 9 mins

Music: Barkin Engin

Eye of Sound: Winner of the Best Experimental Film Award at the Naoussa Short Film Festival, Emek Gül's Foe is a film-essay that aims to explore issues of human displacement, challenging the construction of abnormality and the accommodation of monstrosity both within the self and the social body. According to the director, a metaphorical monster is seen to bridge gaps between the categories of normal and abnormal, a creature who also mimics traits of (normatively) pathological behaviour, namely "somatoform and dissociative disorders". This "overdramatic" creature also aims, Gül says, to act the out freudian theory of the child's psychosexual stages in several sequences: the "I am Defiant" section, for instance, purports to explore the anal retention phase, while the "I am Unique" sequence deals with the effects of the phallic phase on the construction of narcissism. While it is not clear whether such complex problematics flow through Foe's elusive narrative, even to viewers reasonably acquainted with classic psychoanalitic theory, the film's stark, sometimes brutal design, supported by cirurgical computer graphics and an impressive physical performance by Cenk Kurt, offers an intense viewing experience, heightened by a diverse and carefully composed soundtrack that weaves together hiss, grain, frequency and drone.

FOE

GEORGES SCHWIZGEBEL THE RAPTURE OF FRANK N STEIN (1982)

2010-11-19T17:18:00.000-08:00

Director: Georges Schwizgebel

Year: 1982

Time: 9 mins

Music: Michael Horowitz & Rainer Boesch

Eye of Sound: Schwizgebel once commented that Le Ravissement of Frank N. Stein was born of the desire to work intimately with a composer. By teaming up with Michael Horowitz and Rainer Boesch, two electroacoustic and electronic composers that create music by forging unity out of fragmentary sources, Schwizgebel was perhaps offering one of the keys to this immensely rich Frank N Stein edifice - especially if we notice that the soundtrack is built on cycles of crescendos rather than contrasting disparate sound objects. External references abound, Marguerite Duras' Le Ravissement de Vol N. Stein and James Whale's 1935 The Bride of Frankenstein being the most obvious. Duras' novel is acted out, after a brief insight into the monster's inform interiority and laboratorial gestation, in the apparently motionless traversing of endless rooms that are progressively filled out with objects and persons. But this is not an external museum, and we are soon lead to believe that we are crossing the internal landscape of a fragmented being who bears the marks of discontinuity both on his body and in his name. The filling out of such halls is equated with the construction of his selfhood: from the repetition of nothingness, through spaces of complete darkness, to a stage of apparent excess, an illusory surplus of inhabitants blooms out of the original void that predicated the creature's mind - illusory because we are shown that the multiplicity of figures is a guise for the repetition of a mind-cell, one in which only the monster and his fearful bride exist. By the time we reach the final chamber, that of his unified selfhood, we are thrown into The Bride referential territory. And, paradoxically or not, it is, as Amy Lawrence pointed out, when seeing his bride that the monster acquires a self - a self, we may assume, that is immediately shattered by her hysterical rejection of her own male-counterpart. It is also at this moment that we are detached from the monster's vision, but the supplementary distance created by the final scene, in which all is shown to be film and fiction, only temporarily reassures us of our status as spectators: for by allowing us to read the monster as fiction for a few seconds but then placing our theatre seats as part of the film, Schwizgebel immediately relocates us in the fabric of fiction from which our selves had just been rescued from.

LE RAVISSEMENT DE FRANK N STEIN

GEORGE CRUMB MAKROKOSMOS I & II: SCORES (2004)

2010-11-16T20:04:00.000-08:00

Year: 1973/2004

Time: 63 mins

Music:

George Crumb

Margaret Leng Tan

Alex Nowitz

Eye of Sound: Notation naturally underwent the same ruptures that its signified did throughout the 20th century, not only in the attempt to find technically suitable illustrations for unprecedented forms of sonic expression, but also, as it was often the case, as a deliberate attack on the conventions of the graphic representation of sound. In the process, scores became increasingly idiosyncratic, more conscious about their arbitrary (i.e. semiotic) nature, and concomitantly assumed the status of art objects in themselves. Crumb once said that he tries to make scores "as simple and conventional as possible", pointing out that economy and clarity are vital to the performer's understanding of the composer's work; and, when asked to comment on his well-known penchant for elaborate notation designs, the composer simply justified them as "flights of whimsy". There is much more than whimsy to his scores, however, and besides their immense beauty and obvious symbolic import, they are complex enough to have inspired several research essays by well-known musicologists and art historians, not to mention modern mystics of different sorts. As a companion to Leng Tan's performance of George Crumb's zodiacal Makrokosmos I & II, we are lucky enough to be offered the possibility of watching the piece's original scores unfold as the music progresses, allowing us a few glimpses of the composer's aural graphism as well as insights into his verbal understandings of his own compositions ("as if suspended in time" in Agnus Dei/Capricorn, "like a cosmic clockwork" in Magic Circle/Leo); precise indications ("depress white keys silently" in Prophecy/Aries); corrections; dedications (for David Burge and Robert Miller); and humorous remarks ("excellent first piece!" in Primeval/Cancer). A beautiful and enlightening experience in the art of augenmusik, as fascinating as watching Tan and Nowitz play.

MAKROKOSMOS SCORE

GEORGE CRUMB MAKROKOSMOS I & II (2004)

2010-11-15T15:35:00.000-08:00

Director: Evans Chan

Year: 2004

Time: 63 mins

Music:

George Crumb

Margaret Leng Tan

Alex Nowitz

Eye of Sound: Perhaps downplaying their obvious esoteric dimension, Crumb once commented on his two Makrokosmos "books" as an attempt to survey and catalogue all playing techniques and possibilities for the piano. And while no single work can claim to exhaust possibilities in any given domain, Makrokosmos undoubtedly stands out as an impressive survey of the acoustic capabilities of the instrument and the myriad approaches a player can resort to when trying to go beyond conventional playing techniques. Crumb's most notorious compositional trait, his concern with timbral dynamics, is perhaps nowhere else as evident as here; by combining amplification and pedals, Makrokosmos ranges from the barely audible to the dangerously loud, perhaps evoking the creational dynamics implicit in its zodiac-like score design. This chromatic palette is widened by the introduction of foreign objects and the extension of the playing arena: metal chains, drum brushes, paper sheets or simple whistle blows are thrown into the piano to further expand and pervert the instrument's conventional possibilities. Margaret Tan, one of Cage's most renowned performers, delivers the piece with a combination of musical rigour and theatrical performance which seems appropriate for Crumb's choreographic leanings. Finally, Alex Nowitz's contribution is mostly centred on a powerful whistling technique. Despite its apparent freedom and de-structuredness, Makrokosmos is a work of tight compositional design whose immense rigour surfaces only after repeated listenings, and the fact that Tan's performance is the only one that can boast of having been supervised by Crumb himself has lead critics to consider it definitive. Otherworldly, radiating with vitality, at times nocturnal and quasi-lyrical, it is a tapestry of intricate modes and colours as diverse and contradictory as life itself.

MAKROKOSMOS I & II

TOSHIO MATSUMOTO SWAY (1985)

2010-11-14T16:07:00.000-08:00

Director: Toshio Matsumoto

Year: 1985

Time: 8 mins

Music: Takashi Inagaki

Eye of Sound: Perhaps as close to an ethnographic documentary as Matsumoto ever got, Sway seems to explore a persistent, if not entirely explicit, concern in the director's filmography. If Everything Visible, Atman, Ki and even Dongure, among others, were entirely or partly concerned with metaphysics, Sway offers an openly subjective look at a religious cult site in Japan, its ritual routines and the apparent willingness of followers to be taken by a vocabulary of gestures that may or not contradict the implicit néant of those doctrines. In any case, Matsumoto proposes a more generous glance at both the site, which is made to vibrate as if possessed by a radiant energy of some sort, and its practitioners, who are at most points made to carry a visual aura, as if accompanied by something other than themselves, or to become translucent when circumambulating the object of devotion. An usual collaborator of Matsumoto, Inagaki offers a soundtrack reminiscent of Verghya's early works: percussion movements and diluted bells chimes, perhaps alluding to local religious music traditions, are abruptly interjected within atmospheric quasi-drones and rhythmical snaps, providing the visuals with diverse sonic settings that oscillate between introspection and frenzy.

SWAY

ANDREW PEKLER HORROR SALVAGE (2010)

2010-11-13T17:01:00.000-08:00

Director: Andrew Pekler

Year: 2010

Time: 6 mins

Music: Andrew Pekler

Eye of Sound: In his classic piece on screamscapes, Gregory Whitehead defined the scream as a primal outburst of the "pressures of the unspeakable" within an individual body. But the way this manifestation of the unfathomable has been represented in cinema follows a strictly codified language in which invention is replaced by convention, therefore stripping it of its potential for derangement. Andrew Pekler's Horror Salvage perhaps doesn't go as far as presenting an exhaustive "taxonomy of screams" in cinematic forms, but by editing a collection of such disruptive events out of context and sequencing them according to a rhythmical and "grammatical" design, it exposes both their syntagmatic void and part of their paradigmatic logic. Pekler thus divides his study in three short sections that reflect the internal organisation of the kino-scream: intensification and acceleration, followed by a "reflection punctuated by shocks" and concluded with deceleration and/or relief. The piece is accompanied by left-over fragments from Pekler's last album, craftily editing different electroacoustic soundscapes to great effect. While it is unlikely that Horror Salvage will prompt viewers to track down all the horror and sci-fi films from which it was made, it will at least relieve them, as Pekler himself says, of the task of watching the 100 sub-B flicks it condenses.

HORROR SALVAGE

LIS RHODES DRESDEN DYNAMO (1971)

2010-11-11T15:35:00.000-08:00

Director: Lis Rhodes

Year: 1971

Time: 5 mins

Music: Lis Rhodes

Eye of Sound: A classic in the art of optical sound, Dresden Dynamo apparently resulted of an accidental discovery. When applying Letratone to a blank 16mm film soundtrack, Rhodes noticed that it produced a C note; she then composed several images with Letraset, of which she developed positive and negative copies, and later applied color filters in order to develop two-color contrasts. By allowing these compositions to encroach into the soundtrack, Rhodes creates relatively stable sound drawings that are an aural translation of the printed screen, thus expanding on earlier experiments by McLaren and Hébert, among others. The result is a mind-bending experiment in which the interaction between simple geometrical, aural and chromatic patterns generates infinite illusory events and in which colour and shape subtly pervert one another, forcing foreground and background to constantly change positions in order to conjure depth and movement.

DRESDEN DYNAMO

DAN AGNEW DOPPLER EFFECT VERSION II (1968)

2010-11-09T17:56:00.000-08:00

Director: Dan Agnew

Year: 1968

Time: 5 mins

Music: Duane Hitchings

Eye of Sound: A sequel of his previous 1967 homonymous experiment, Doppler Effect II moves one step forward in the mission of organising seemingly random stock footage along a rhythmical axis. By using found footage of diverse origin - political announcements, animal life, porn - and intertwining it with images recorded by Agnew himself - cityscapes, abstract light essays -, the film abandons any attempt of evoking meaning of any sort and focuses on a strictly formal exercise centred on time intervals and micro-relations between small sets of images. The soundtrack, recorded by Duane Hitchings (known for his collaborations with Miles Davis and Hendrix, but also for his Flashdance OST) on a Moog synth, is an engaging exercise in abstract sonic dynamics and an essential part of the Doppler experiment in that it not only provides different aural settings for the diverse footage presented throughout the film, but also aptly sets the pace for the fast succession of synched images.

DOPPLER EFFECT II

TAKAHIKO IIMURA ONAN (1963)

2010-11-08T15:07:00.000-08:00

Director: Takahiko Iimura

Year: 1963

Time: 8 mins

Music: Yasunao Tone

Eye of Sound: Apparently Iimura's first experiment with 16mm film, Onan was also his first work to receive wider international attention. A tale of auto-erotic imprisonment, it elegantly explores the violent relationship between a young man and the images he brings to life through his unbridled desire. This deranging and unbalanced relationship, ultimately predicated on isolation and an inability to communicate, implies the destruction of these images and eventually results in the delivery of a strange oval form that seems to have been born from, or stand for, his seed. Knowing not what to do with this form of himself, he hands it over to a young girl who, like Tamar, drops it to the ground. The noise layers that accompanied the young man's self-exertion, created by Yasunao Tone (member of the original Fluxus crew and co-founder of Group Ongaku but mostly known for his later works with CDs), are then suspended and he is left, alone and exhausted, in the open, abandoning us with a silent and poignant commentary on the aporias of the myths of self-sufficiency and sexual liberation.

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ONAN

THE OUTSIDER: THE STORY OF HARRY PARTCH (2002)

2010-11-06T20:27:00.000-07:00

Director: Darren Chesworth

Year: 2002

Time: 59 mins

Music: Harry Partch

Eye of Sound: His obsession with the subjective human voice and the musicality of speech; his partly relativistic deconstruction of the twelve-note scale as an arbitrary straitjacket; his ethnographic sensibility towards different modes of conceiving language, tuning and existence; his need to create channels suited for his new microtonal chromatic universe; his expansion into convergent fields of expression such as film, theatre and dance; and his desire to capture the vernacular as a locus for the textures of being - all these probably make Partch's the most encompassing of modern creative utopias. Such an overarching project of existence and creation, obviously, could hardly be comprised in an one-hour documentary, and it would take a considerable amount of creativity and an unflinching focus to cast a shadow of justice over Partch's vision in such a short time. One aspect that could have been jettisoned is, as usual, the biographic mode, the linear movement from A to Z that suggests apparently logic explanations and connections for processes and objects that are far from logical and linear, supported by an invisible voice-over narration that simulates contextualization and sequence. Narrative becomes a form of containment and disambiguation: Partch's struggle with devitalized modes of composition and the 12-tone octave is all of a sudden brought into light by the reading of one single book, On the Sensation of Tone by H. Helmholtz, and his "discovery" of the arbitrary nature of the Western scale smoothly harmonised with his several inner and outer "deviances", sexuality included; inversely, Partch's long-celebrated and romanticised decision to follow a hobo trail for almost a decade is simply glossed as a reaction to the Great Depression and left strangely disconnected from the surrounding acts. There are the usual statements by friends, patrons and composers, such as Lou Harrison, Gavin Bryars, John Schneider, Phillip Blackburn, and Phillip Glass, adding very little to our understanding of Partch's universe, and it is from biographers and archivists that the most illuminating comments stem from. While the focus on the apparent eccentricity of the man seems to be a fruitless compromise with the conventions of current personality cults - including a minor polemic with Cage to boot -, it is not surprising that the most rewarding sections focus on the technical aspects of his work, microtonality being efficiently summarised bur perhaps not fully explored in its symbolic reach. The eclipse of "the truth of just intonation" was seen by Partch as a conspiracy in which "pure" musical structures had been corrupted and dilluted by a powerful but stifling hierarchical model, one that curtailed freedom and fostered forms of conformism. This supposedly pure tuning of ancient Greek tradition, which Partch tried to build into his microtonal edifice, and its promises of a wider access to the the truth that is supposed to inhere in the human voice, holds some of the keys for the composer's universe: a romantic search for a temps perdu, thought to be found both in ancient traditions and non-Western contemporary societies, guided, as ever, by a subversive desire to implode homeland strictures.

THE OUTSIDER

DEREK BAILEY PLAYING FOR FRIENDS ON 5th STREET (2004)

2010-11-01T13:01:00.000-07:00

Director: Robert O'Haire

Year: 2004

Time: 50 mins

Music: Derek Bailey

Eye of Sound: The camera's movements are casual, and the post-production efforts meagre. But that is just part of the narrative strategy to convey the sense of intimacy implicit in the title: a small friendly circle of amicable ears and eyes, casually enjoying the music of someone who just happens to be the most celebrated guitar player in the history of adventurous music, but who behaves as if he were just playing a few chords while waiting for his dinner to cook. In between, a few funny stories about the man's past as a guitar teacher in London, some interactions with the "public", and even Django-like interludes and a Penthouse Serenade quote to boot. Both the performance and film-production were designed as an intimate portrait: of Bailey and his music, of course, but also of the DMG (Downtown Music Gallery) store in Downtown NY, where several such performances by avant and not-so-avant musicians have been hosted before. The camera effects used to spice up the film are absolutely superfluous and risible, but the sound capture is close to optimal: Bailey's surgical attacks on the strings sound as clear as in any other good recording you may have, and probably as close to the listening experience you'd have there as possible. Bailey's performance is unsurprisingly entrancing: twisting notions of tonal and atonal, at times hectic but also placid and meditative, his acoustic guitar playing covers the sometimes irreconcilable values of emotionality and artistic adventurousness. Of course, one may legitimately ask how free these improvisations actually are, given the unmistakeable "baileyness" of the performance; but I'd say that in view of this 2001 performance's impressive technique, passion and inventiveness, such issues sound like mere theoretical trifles.

PLAYING FOR FRIENDS ON 5TH STREET

GRANULAR SYNTHESIS RESET REMIXED (2003)

2010-10-31T10:28:00.000-07:00

Directors: Granular Synthesis

Year: 2001

Time: 20 mins

Music: Granular Synthesis

Eye of Sound: Commissioned for the Venice Biennial in 2001, Reset was an audiovisual installation addressing problems in the relation between colour and sound, and was here "remixed" for home consumption. The Austrian duo (Kurt Hentschlaeger and Ulf Langheinrich) have in fact focused much of their output on definitions of synaesthetic processes through creative uses of synthetic technology. In the Biennale, Reset was composed of two semi-giant screens, each exhibiting one basic looped visual track. These "tracks" comprised a succession of synthesised audiovisual samples produced, according to Langheinrich, through the "consecutive synthesis of individual samples" rather than through "a pre-arranged sound-image relation". Reset Remixed fuses these two separate tracks in order to create an alarmingly intense audiovisual experience in which the throbbing parade of visual and sonic chromatic tonalities results in a coherent composition that does not betray the fractured nature of its materials. Each colour is associated with a given sound (or vice-versa), thought to be warmer or colder according to a idiosyncratic scale, resulting in a dazzling chain of colour pulses and aural throbs. Each frame is thus a perceptual object vibration in itself, but their succession results in an immersive, seamless whole that affords no discontinuity.

- Film kindly offered by Damayanti via email -

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RESET REMIXED

HUGO VERLINDE GÉMINGA (2003)

2010-10-27T16:55:00.000-07:00

Director: Hugo Verlinde

Year: 2003

Time: 9 mins

Music: Hugo Verlinde

Eye of Sound: A "sequel" to Verlinde's 2001 work Aldebaran, Géminga continues to explore relations between surface and projection, light and dark, body and environment. Surrounded by a carefully crafted cascade of environmental recordings, a body is used as a surface for the projection of chromatic textures and images of unrecognisable provenience: abstract light-designs that find a temporary resting point on skin. In its visual elusiveness and absorbing function, this body is given a strange sense of frailty, as if powerless before the aural and plastic siege within which it has been placed. At the same time, its own carnality seems to be overcome, rendered both insignificant in its role as a reflection surface for subtler realities and almost shapeless in its task as a mere vessel or host for more fluid levels of being.

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GÉMINGA

SABRINA RATTÉ MIRAGES (2010)

2010-10-25T18:11:00.000-07:00

Director: Sabrina Ratté

Year: 2010

Time: 18 mins

Music: Le Révélateur
Eye of Sound: One of the most promising names in Canadian experimental film today, Sabrina Ratté has been exploring the mysteries of colour, contour and shape in moving images for nearly a decade. Not afraid to frame filmic experiments as such, her films usually convey a sense of discovery and risk but also of conceptual focus and matured observation of materials, often betraying an acute awareness of video-art history and sources. Mirages was born of an ongoing collaboration with Montréal-based musician Le Révélateur: having been projected at several of his live performances, it evolved and metamorphosed in a concert immersion context which is, I believe, hinted at throughout the film. Working, as in other films, with relatively simple materials and a contemplative stance, Ratté begins by exploring the flickering movement of light and its distortion as it is translated into the digital realm, using chromatic excess as a means to corrupt her sources' integrity. These somewhat inform images of natural events slowly morph into geometric grids with which moving human silhouettes are later juxtaposed before we are finally sent back to the abstract shapes that opened the film, now harmonised with these colour-looms and figurative forms. Perhaps intended as a veiled tribute to the video-art tradition of the 70s (a connection which could be said to be reinforced by Révélateur's "library"-reminiscent soundtrack), Mirages is an aptly chosen title for this work, as its optical explosions seem to be built like an inquiry into some of our perception habits and a test to their limits.

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MIRAGES

EDWARD QUIST / PAN SONIC KUVAPUTKI (2008)

2010-10-24T10:37:00.000-07:00

Director: Edward Quist

Year: 2008

Time: 3 X 38 mins

Music: Pan Sonic

Eye of Sound: Still known as Panasonic among old friends, Vainio and Väisänen are known to produce some of the most intensely cold music since the glorious days of NDW. Their blend of glacial pulse-beat aggression (inherited from their early weirdo-techno experiences), white-noise static and hi-fi aural spatialisation (closer to "avant-garde" concerns) has given the Finnish duo some notoriety both in the experimental music circuit and among the ultimately conservative electronica crowd, creating a rather heterodox support basis for the band. Inspired in the imagery of the cathode (something which seems to be acquiring some currency in the past years), american artist Edward Quist offers a "multi-angle" reading of Panasonic's music by drawing on a 1999 live performance in New York (these "angles" being here divided in separate files). The screen space is mercilessly invaded by violent graphics designed to translate, or respond to, Panasonic's static washes and often brutal pulses, its unembellished black and white compositions aptly reflecting the band's bleak soundworld. Its strobing punctuations, though obviously inspired by the obsolete tradition of techno videography, can be physically deranging and mentally exhausting, miles away from the flat landscapes offered by those standardised forms of mindless pseudo-psychedelism that are still served as a visual accompaniment to beat-oriented music. In fact, Quist's sinister waveform designs are systematically distorted and pushed to their own figurative limits, aiming, much like the duo's aural excitement, to implode rather than to contain source materials and to afflict rather than soothe the viewer. Strangely enough, the duo's excursions into the radiances of the body electric are often labeled as "minimalist" or other adjectives that seem designed to spare readers and writers further thought instead of trying to expand our understanding of Panasonic's vision. Indeed, despite their typically self-restrained management of their materials and far from rich chromatic palette, Panasonic's audio design is one of excess, hyperbole and exaggeration of microscopic events, rendering the "minimalist" description absolutely absurd. Perhaps guilty of an excessively literal and predictable rendering of Panasonic's analog soundscapes, Quist's Kuvaputki videos can nevertheless, in their fruitful tension between stasis and implosion, boast of faithfully documenting both the duo's aural vision and their live performances by the end of the century, making this a rather unique "tour doc".

This post is a collaboration between SOE and Double Avenue.

The "angles" are here rendered as separate files.

KUVAPUTKI

CATHODE RAY TUBE

SET

THE SCIENCE EYE QUARTERLY #1

2010-10-22T11:56:00.000-07:00

Today we inaugurate a new series here on Sound of Eye by contributor Prof. Grey Herbert called The Science Eye Quarterly, wherein we spotlight scientific research and news events in which the audio-visual realm is either destroyed or reborn in the blink of an eye. Of course, on a daily basis we assume that our own coordination of the audio-visual is true and correct, but when this audio visual axis is placed under the micro or macroscope of science we can begin to see the alarming aura surrounding us that is filled with noise and light. It is this tohu-bohu that we wish to pursue further.
***
This week a SoE was spotted in the annals of the Public Library of Science in an article titled A Preliminary Investigation Regarding the Effect of Tennis Grunting: Does White Noise During a Tennis Shot have a Negative Impact on Shot Perception? which confirmed the suspicions of many professional tennis players that grunting during a tennis match is detrimental and unfair play since it prevents one’s opponent from “seeing” the ball as it is hit by the racket. There appears to be a visual audio-event that is obfuscated by the grunt and which causes a degree of confusion for the opponent. According to the authors: “It still remains unknown, and it will be very difficult to ascertain, whether many of the most prolific grunters intentionally grunt to interfere with their opponent's performance. Regardless, our data suggest that when they grunt they are gaining an unfair advantage. Our study indicates that grunting not only decreases an opponent's ability to judge the direction of a shot, it also reduces the amount of time they have to respond to every shot. These consequences on faster tennis surfaces, such as the grass courts of Wimbledon, or the hard courts of the Australian and US Open, are likely to be profound.” Watch the video “Sharapova grunts” here.

Kindly contributed by Prof. Grey Herbert

MACIEJ ĆWIEK STOMP (1984)

2010-10-21T19:01:00.000-07:00

Director: Maciej Ćwiek

Year: 1984

Time: 7 mins

Music: Krzesimir Debski

Eye of Sound: Ćwiek's debut as a director is an intriguing showcase of collage elegance and rhythmical acuity achieved through apparently simple techniques, its meaning being perhaps as elusive as the piece is visually engaging. Initially reminiscent of Len Lye's early experiments with film scratch, Stomp quickly dives into a black and white parade of almost self-contained beautiful visual print compositions . Time and individuality seem to be the main thematic issues at work, as we are drawn to watch the gradual coming together of a fragmented and incomplete self along a very literal diachronic line. Fingerprints, foot plants, faces and loose letters (perhaps alluding to unformed names) seem to climb the stairs of the construction of selfhood, these staircases being analogous to the timeline that anxiously takes the screen throughout most of Stomp. Krzesimir Debski's musical accompaniment is an uncanny blend of faux-jazz and "library" soundworks interspersed with dramatic atonal sketches that render Stomp an even more unclassifiable piece.

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STOMP

RYOJI IKEDA / SHIRO TAKATANI FORMULA (2002)

2010-10-14T20:01:00.000-07:00

Video: Shiro Takatani

Year: 2002

Time: 65 mins

Music: Ryoji Ikeda

Eye of Sound: By the mid-90s Ikeda offered the audio world a violent, but quiet, revolution. Others would follow his trail and get all the credit, Ikeda being left with only a few crumbles of the goldmine he had located for the (often uninspired) laptop generation. Of course, the test-tone/high-pitched frequency turn in electronic music could perhaps have happened anywhere else at the time: all revolutions seem, a posteriori, to have been bound to happen, just waiting for someone to pull the first trigger. But it's probably a good thing that Ikeda was the one who first stepped in into this relatively unknown island, since his clarity, simplicity and almost eugenic approach to his materials left us with an almost complete topography of this newly-found territory, leaving copycats the burden of sheer emulation or trivialisation and forcing creative artists to push forward in new directions. Formula documents concerts and installations recorded between 1998 and 2002. The first section includes audio installations recorded in Europe and Tokyo, featuring excerpts from albums like 0º or Matrix over a dark screen. The second section comprises a 2001 Tokyo concert in which Ikeda's gelid pulses and frequencies are synched against video-patterns designed by Dumb Type's Shiro Takatani, revisiting material from the 1996 classic +/- and other works. In their stark strobo-geometry and perception-bending force, Takatani's designs are probably the most accurate visual renditions of Ikeda's music. No matter how large your tv-set is or how clean and powerful your speakers are, this can't replace or come close to the unique experience of actually attending Ikeda performances. But if you hadn't had the chance to see and hear them in loco, the Formula collection and a bit of imagination may take you somewhere near.

Link removed under DMCA threat

IMERY WATSON SLOUP (2006)

2010-10-11T19:52:00.000-07:00

Director: Imery Watson

Year: 2006

Time: 5 mins

Music: Susumu Yokota

Eye of Sound: Perhaps falling within the inform "music video" category, Sloup was somewhat hermetically defined by Imery Watson (who is credited as the concept artist behind such mainstream works as Batman Begins and, er, Harry Potter) as a reflection on mythology, geometry and man-made structures. What at first seems to be a travel film, tinged with the apparently unavoidable melancholy generated by expanding industrialisation, quickly morphs into more abstract visual compositions in which aeroplanes crossing the skies are assimilated to the jumbled wires connecting electricity towers along a railroad line. These are then given a clearer anthropomorphic shape and motion, and made to literally run along with the camera's train, using 3D graphs, till they finally join the planes we'd seen earlier in the sky. The point is rather unclear, despite some vague allusions to problems on the relation of space and time, travelling speed, and the anthropomorphising instincts of perception. Susumu Yokota's soundtrack, released in 2002, is composed of a few loops apparently taken from Balinese recordings, resulting in the clean ambient soundscape that made him relatively well-known in recent years, with a "fourth-world" ambiance that could have come from the vaults of Zoviet France if they had kept away from drugs and existential issues.

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SLOUP

SPACE GHOST COAST TO COAST SHARROCK (1996)

2010-10-09T11:14:00.000-07:00

Year: 1996

Time: 12 mins

Music:

Sonny Sharrock

Eddie Horst

Lance Carter

Alfrieda Gerald

Eye of Sound: Very loosely based on the original Hanna-Barbera Space Ghost series, Coast to Coast was aired in the early 90s as a light-hearted manifesto of post cold-war dadacidal humor, and could be seen as Cartoon Network's attempt to tap into the then emerging "alternative" nation of America. Anodinous, hilarious or plain weird, Coast to Coast reinvented the honorable fake-interview tradition by having pre-recorded conversations with "celebrities" and people like us rearranged by the nonchalant and ego-maniacal Space Ghost. In this very special episode, Thurston Moore incarnates one Fred Cracklin in a brief non-sensical cameo which is but a pretext to pay homage to the great avant-noise-jazz-blues guitar player Sonny Sharrock, who had recently expired. If the Coast to Coast series is bizarre for any standards of good TV conduct, the Sharrock episode is particularly strange in that its plot is a lame excuse to pay tribute to the musician and listen to several minutes of his ethereal noise-jazz guitar, thinly framed by some silly jokes between the Ghost and his adorable sidekicks.

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SHARROCK

JACQUELINE CAUX & OLIVIER PASCAL PRESQUE RIEN AVEC LUC FERRARI (2005)

2010-10-05T10:40:00.000-07:00

Directors: Jacqueline Caux & Olivier Pascal

Year: 2005

Time: 50 mins

Music:

Luc Ferrari

Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain

Elise Caron

Claude Berset

Christof Schlaeger

Erik M

Eye of Sound: The decision to retain the original title of this documentary, instead of following the rule of translating all film names, can be justified by the fact that anyone familiar with Luc Ferrari will recognize the reference to some of the composer's most famous works, the Presque Rien series, and particularly his 1989 piece Presque Rien avec Filles (Almost Nothing with Girls). Much more than a mere music-documentary, Caux's and Pascal's Presque Rien is possibly the definitive Ferrari doc, not only because of the composer's willingness to play along with the directors' playful design but mostly because of their creative assimilation of his artistic and philosophical mischievousness. Although comprising several different sections that use different aesthetical and narrative strategies, Presque Rien almost seamlessly flows between these often contradictory approaches, its multifarious form being in itself an implicit tribute to the chronic deviancy of Ferrari's career. The film's narrative linchpin is a series of autobiographical notes taken from an homonymous book by Caux herself. But the use of these fragments is far from conventional, since Caux and Pascal decide to pull a narrative trick rarely seen outside Chris Marker's works: to subvert the tradition of the "voice of god" documentary voice-over by having an actress, Elise Caron, deliver Ferrari's most intimate confessions and remembrances - perhaps to reinforce the association between the composer and the Filles allegedly lacking in his life but so deeply present in his music, as well as to multiply the myriad personas emerging from his oeuvre. Ferrari also plays himself, but mostly on more "technical" notes (in which, nevertheless, his generosity and inability to take himself too seriously are absolutely transparent). There is the more conventional melange of live and backstage footage, including rehearsals for his Cahier du Soir "opera" with Elise Caron and the Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain, live collaborations with Christof Schlaeger and Erik M (this one using old Ferrari raw materials), and short excerpts from a 2003 Claude Berset performance of the 36 Enfilades piece for piano and magnetophone. Some of the most beautiful moments, however, stem from an audiovisual installation Ferrari produced between 1995 and 2000: entitled Cycle de Souvenirs (Cycle of Remembrances), it was composed of footage captured in key locations of Ferrari's personal and artistic life, supported by a random composition in which six discs comprising recordings of anodinous urban and domestic soundscapes were constantly shuffled and rearranged, bearing the mark of the composer's concern with chance events and the relations between memory and biography. Several other events contribute to the narrative's richness and density: the perhaps surprising election of John Cage as his major aesthetic and philosophical influence (upon whom Ferrari's early escape from serialism and life-time commitment with non-alignment are implicitly predicated), the identification of the soundtrack for Honegger's classic Pacific 231 (soon on SOE) as a decisive moment in his aural formation, or the jocose justification of his early involvement in concrète explorations as the most barbaric possibility available at the time. If forced to choose one single highlight, however, I'd go for Ferrari's hilarious audio stroll through a parisian suburb amusement park: surrounded by excessive chromatic and sonic stimuluses, the composer's posture betrays neither the shyness of the guilt-ridden voyeur nor the blind aggressiveness of the artist ready to devour his source materials at the cost of their dignity; like a child in a candy store, his is a gaze of sheer delight, immersed in the overwhelming and unembellished pleasures of his senses.

fresh link available

PRESQUE RIEN AVEC LUC FERRARI

SUZAN PITT ASPARAGUS (1979)

2010-10-04T03:39:00.000-07:00

Director: Suzan Pitt

Year: 1979

Time: 18 mins

Music:

Richard Teitelbaum

with

Steve Lacy

Takehisa Kosugi

George Lewis

Steve Potts

Eye of Sound: Having been presented for more than two years just before Lynch's Eraserhead is no small honour, but in the case of this masterpiece it would be fair to ask whose honour it was anyway. There would be much to say about the many intersections of the works of Suzan Pitt and David Lynch, but it may be enough to state that, despite the growing trivialisation of the surrealist badge, very few other American filmmakers have been so deeply imbued with that vital nexus between formal experimentation and the exploration of the obscure forces that lurk behind human psyche and praxis. Defying analytical efforts since the 80s, Asparagus, arguably Pitt's finest work, is a symbolic reflection on issues of female sexuality, art and identity constructs. And that's probably how far one can go: the visual narrative is as lavish and vibrant as elusive and hermetic, and Pitt's claim that Asparagus is not designed to be reflected upon but to be felt seems reasonable enough in face of the immense interpretive difficulties raised by the struggle between its unstoppable flow of onirical but culturally familiar imagery and our equally untamed desire for exegetical decomposition. A woman, locked in an over-stuffed house that increasingly resembles her self, opens its red curtains to gaze at the outside world. This, perhaps, is not really an external world, not only because this oversized "exterior" reality is replicated, at various points, in the inner/domestic realm, but also because Asparagus, like an animated Klein bottle, constantly juggles with, and refuses, distinctions between within and without. Grotesque floral shapes that seem to border on the female carnal soon give way to openly phallic vegetable forms - the eponymous asparaguses - which are gently caressed by a giant creature whose face we are not allowed to see, but which we may suspect to belong to the woman who is watching it (and, indeed, the same asparaguses that are now caressed - and sucked later - are shown at the opening sequence being defecated by the same "character"). When this caressing hand disappears, we are sent back into the house to witness a more explicit illustration of the imbrication of reality levels that seems to traverse the entire Asparagus province: the woman closely watches a replica of the house where she is seen closely watching a replica of the house, and so on. Deep inside this final replica, on the farthest level of this continuous nesting of frames, we finally find a room where several masks (personas?) are kept, as if this is a costume room in a theatre backstage. The woman chooses one of these and, for the first time, although through the protection of a mask, we are shown "her face"; as "fake" as it may be, this is the closer she'll ever be to having one. After packing her inner, domestic and mildly eroticised world in a bag, as if these were props for a show, the woman finally ventures on the "outside", her identity defined - rather than protected - by the female mask she chose. This outer world is, again, populated by images of sexual consumption, phalluses being given the same erotic significance as hands. But hers is not a goalless rambling; she aims straight at a Theatre where we are promised "optical illusions", "feats of activity" and "dreams of art". The woman goes backsatge, behind these illusions, and she's obviously at home. So much so that she feels free to release her inner world on stage: the asparagus-couch she has fondled before, the omnipresent edenic serpent we first saw encircling her naked leg and many other objects that seem designed to marvel the eye as much as to capture islands of memory. After exposing her innner universe, the artist leaves her theater and finally removes her mask: she is faceless, nothing but as blank surface. Her memories and existential fragments now float in the air, apparently free to roam. Back in the domestic realm, to remove the mask is explicitly equated with undressing: she can now finally open the window that was separating her from the phallic shapes that lay "outside", those manifold asparaguses that required all that spectacle of release to become reachable, graspable, edible. A reflective edifice of immensely powerful symbolic correspondences, Asparagus has been strangely portrayed as a milestone in feminist filmmaking, as if any enquiry by a female artist into the realm of the erotic must be aligned with something other than the personal - an onus which males are usually spared. The carnal mysteries paraded here seem, however, to owe many of its concerns, techniques and vocabulary to psychoanalysis, a field which has been commonly accused of being built upon male chauvinism. As baffling as a mythical narrative and elusive as a rescued dreamscape, Asparagus remains, in all its beauty, density and glory, utterly unreachable, eliciting new readings at every viewing.

ASPARAGUS

RUTH LINGFORD WHAT SHE WANTS (1994)

2010-09-30T23:23:00.000-07:00

Director: Ruth Lingford

Year: 1994

Time: 5 mins

Music: Lol Coxhill

Eye of Sound: Entirely produced with an Amiga 1500 computer and supported by a haunting solo sax performance by British stalwart Lol Coxhill, What She Wants is a powerful and disturbing reflection both on the contradictory challenges of womanhood in capitalist societies living under the banner of sexual revolution and the increasingly dominant equivalence of status, commodity and sexuality. Using a starker design than the one applied in her famous 1997 work Death and the Mother, Ruth Lingford violently condenses some of the contesting anxieties, fears and aspirations that swarm around contemporary models of femininity, often short-circuiting efforts at completeness and integrity, while drawing a subtle critique of the growing intrusion of capital in the constitution and exercise of desire. Images of erotic abandonment clash with fertility demands; advertisements that explore the commodification of romance and monogamy co-exist with over-sexualized models of status, fitness and public desirability; motherhood threatens sexuality much in the same way that a fellatio becomes an act of infantophagy and a suckling baby is transformed into a raping wolf. Desire is thus besieged by circles of violence, as if conscience and psyche are under constant rape by capitalist courtship, so that a coin purse can be morphed into a bright red vulva or an ejaculating phallus. However, as "the market" has taught us, there is a price for everything and, where pleasure and cashflow can be equated, poverty can be a symbol of detumescence.

Dedicated to NMM

* fresh link available *

WHAT SHE WANTS

BERNARD WILETS DISCOVERING ELECTRONIC MUSIC: REVISED (1983)

2010-09-28T18:35:00.000-07:00

Director: Bernard Wilets

Year: 1983

Time: 22 mins

Music: Jean-Claude Risset, Douglas Leedy, F.R. Moore, Stephan Soomil, Rory Kaplan, Geral Strang

Eye of Sound: Arriviste documentaries and manifestoes on "new" forms of art (or knowledge) run the danger of quickly losing the aura of novelty and, by virtue of their overstressed temporality (inherent in their claims to freshness), of soon becoming objects of mere historical curiosity, scorn or simple antiquarian pillaging. When such forms are related to technology, the source for all our illusions of progress, the danger is even stronger since, in the context of modernity's own myths of techno-humanistic evolutionism, yesterday's revolution is inevitably today's conservatism. Wilets' Discovering Electronic Music is a strangely perverse example of these self-constructed traps in that it talks and acts as if describing an impeding revolution while sounding - for its own time - tremendously outdated and, even stranger, hugely conservative in its scope and intent. Granted, this is an overtly educational film, aiming to "instruct" an audience allegedly weary of electronic possibilities in aural construction. But one may ask if such efforts didn't work in the opposite direction, reinforcing fears and resistances by its chosen strategies. The fact that Gerald Strang, one of the most tedious and uninteresting composers to have ever touched a synthesiser, was chosen as the "advisor" for the film may explain part of this conservatism. Throughout the documentary, we are slowly shown the basic tools and functions of the synth - such as oscillators, wave forms, envelopes, filters, etc. We see the fairly novel Fairlight CMI synth and the already outdated Moog modular. The purpose of these, however, is never to create new musical possibilities: what we see instead is several synth-renditions (or shall we say asphyxiations?) of Bach's beautiful "little" Fugue in G minor and many examples of the fortunately forsaken dream of making those huge and expensive machines sound like traditional instruments (such as the Japanese koto or the trumpet). The year was 1983. Many seminal works in academic electronic music had already been produced, pushing aural abstraction and depth to new levels; popular music had already been irrevocably taken by the electronic virus; and, consequently, avant-garde and fringe artists had been working with the medium for a long time. It is thus very difficult to understand the place and strategies of this inadvertidly retro approach to the electronic soundscape, even if we consider that this is a "revised" version of a 1970 homonymous documentary. The joint efforts of Wilets, known for his moron-paced educational docs, and Strang, (un)known for his generally uninspired compositions, have produced a film whose main interest lies in its strange juggling of different pasts, and in which the presence of such luminaries as Jean-Claude Risset and Douglas Leedy does not take the viewer beyond the museologist's pleasure of gazing at the future ruins of these historical monuments: giant synthesisers, ugly knobs and oversized diskettes.

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DISCOVERING ELECTRONIC MUSIC

TAKASHI ITO DEVIL'S CIRCUIT (1988)

2010-09-26T12:05:00.000-07:00

Director: Takashi Ito

Year: 1988

Time: 8 mins

Music: Takashi Inagake

Eye of Sound: Up jumped the devil, in this case an imposing skyscraper somewhere in Tokyo, Kyoto, or any given Japanese metropolis. Maybe Takashi Ito decided to demonise the building for its brute ugliness, or maybe for deeper symbolic reasons. But the fact is that the filmmaker pays homage to this devil, performing a riveting circumambulation around its concrete body without ever losing sight of it; and, indeed, Ito's original idea was to honour not an anonymous skyscraper, but Mount Fuji itself - a massive physical body with strong religious resonances in Japanese culture. The idea is as simple as its execution is brilliant: having identified the object of worship, Ito elected it as the centre of an imaginary radius of about 500 metres which was then divided in 48 sections; Ito then photographed the building from these 48 spots, on different occasions, and edited the photos, frame by frame, into a hypnotic, accelerated cityscape carrousel. The result is not only a beautiful study on the overarching presence of this building across the city, but also a richly detailed map in which the evil skyscraper is consistently contrasted with and contextualized against different or similar forms of urban landscape. Inagake's soundtrack, with which the stills seem to be synched, is a soothing but somehow bleak embrace of soft electro loops, as if Tom Dokoupil had woken up in a particularly good humour before joining up with the Laughing Hands for a good healthy breakfast. Silly framings aside, Inagake's atmospherics do manage to soften the Devil's experience, for which a more predictable accompaniment would be a noise assault so typical of contemporary reflections on modernity and the city. One of Ito's most impressive works.

DEVIL'S CIRCUIT

PHIL HOPKINS AMPLIFIED GESTURE (2009)

2010-09-24T21:56:00.000-07:00

Director: Phil Hopkins

Year: 2009

Time: 56 mins

Music: Eddie Prévost, Evan Parker, Fennesz, John Tilbury, Keith Rowe, Michael Moser, David Sylvian, Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura, Werner Dafeldecker.

Eye of Sound: The subtitle for this suspenseful documentary, An Introduction to Free Improvistation: Practicioners and their Philosophy, could perhaps be criticised for being misleading or, at least, for failing to deliver its promise. But it would probably be unfair to blame director Phil Hopkins for all its shortcomings: Amplified Gesture was commissioned as a visual companion to David Syvian's Manafon and, as such, the director was forced to interview all the musicians participating in the project. Strangely enough, improv is not an area in which "practitioners" have developed an acute sense of theoretical and critical creativity: except for Tim Hodgkinson, whose theoretical polemics sometimes draw close to absurdity and fundamentalism, and a few others thinkers, the "scene" seems not to have an articulate spokesmen to explore its mysteries, dilemmas and "philosophy". Nevertheless, there is a clear generational divide in the cast for Amplified Gesture: on the one hand, old-school British giants such as Evan Parker, Eddie Prévost and Keith Rowe; on the other, younger Japanese luminaries and miscigenators like Sachiko M, Otomo Yoshihide and Toshimaru Nakamura. It is perhaps sad to note that the old folks win by a landslide, discussing pertinent issues on the politics and practice of improv, while the kids usually have nothing to say but such platitudes as "I wanted to do my own thing" or "I started playing because I wanted to get a girlfriend". John Butcher rightfully comments on the progressive standardisation and narrowing down of improv musical practices, but also notes that this is concomitant with a more detailed analysis of materials. Prévost discusses the political implications of technique and composition, and briefly alludes to the art of listening in playing as well as to the creative role of audiences and their input on performance. Evan Parker, perhaps the most solid thinker in the cast, explores the dynamic "bio-feedback" relation between musician and instrument, the wills and destinies of the instrument when in charge of the musician, and the need for "estimation" abilities in the context of the ideals of control over the improvised event; he also touches on the humanist dimensions of music communication, and tries to place improv in the context of a continuing resistance to commodification that also extends to other fields of expression. Overall, as an essay on the art of memory and forgetting as condensed in the always expanding field of "free improv", Amplified Gesture falls short of the expectations it creates. Nevertheless, it is a enticing work for anyone interested in improv or the musicians involved.

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AMPLIFIED GESTURE

DARIUSZ KOWALSKI ELEMENTS (2006)

2010-09-21T08:07:00.000-07:00

Director: Dariusz Kowalski

Year: 2006

Time: 8 mins

Music: Stefan Németh

Eye of Sound: Although perhaps cruder in gesture and less lyrical in effect, Kowalski's Elements shares many technical and thematic affinites with Elke Groen's Nightstill. The protagonists are the same: the snowy uninhabitable landscapes, not of the Alps, but of the Alaska; the unflinching winds that daily sweep its vast plains and push cloud formations to their inevitable dissolution; the monotonous light cycles that cast an illusion of change on an unchanging eyescape; and the sometimes disturbingly illusory permanence of man-made and natural scenic objects immersed in a tumultuous and violent wash of transformation. The technical means used to articulate this beautiful study on landscape also bear similarities to Nightstill, resorting to an impressive application of time-lapse in order to inflict violent temporal dislocations on an otherwise placid picture. Unlike Groen's work, however, Elements does not venture into the field and uses footage taken from a website designed to observe the weather in Alaskan airfields: this lends it a much rougher quality but also a starker, unembellished perspective on the ice deserts. This starker approach is also reflected in Németh's soundtrack: grainy particles of sound that seem intended to emulate the violent clash of wind and dust against the camera only briefly give in to more "musical" drones that are immediately followed by figurative allusions to aeroplanes, wind hisses and control-tower voice-cracks.

ELEMENTS

RICHARD KERN THE EVIL CAMERAMAN (1990)

2010-09-18T21:40:00.000-07:00

Director: Richard Kern

Year: 1990

Time: 11 mins

Music: Foetus

Eye of Sound: Known to be an autobiographical film, The Evil Cameraman playfully narrates a transition in the life and career of NY cult filmmaker Richard Kern. Shot between 1987 and 1990, the film is divided in two pairs of two segments, each pair depicting a different historical, geographical, social and artistic context in Kern's trajectory. The first two segments, set in a bleak, low-lit past, introduce us to Jap Anne, an emaciated girl possibly to be included in the increasingly popular "barely legal" category, and Ice Queen, a lusciously cheap-looking blonde. Both are mercilessly subjected to the violent whims of this cameraman - none other than Kern himself - who seems to use his camera as a pretext for acting out his SM fantasies rather than the inverse. Though far from shocking by today's standards, these segments have a psychological - rather than scenic - realism that can be disturbing for viewers less tolerant of erotic violence. The last two segments, explicitly set "two years later", present Kern in a different context. Having moved out of the Lower East Side area, Kern abandons his leather-junky looks and virulent environment and moves in into a cleaner, brighter, more bourgeois ambiance. The women Kern is working with (Little Linda and Jacqui O) now look healthier, prettier and certainly more assertive about their right to reject the filmmaker's debauchery: they are, as John Rocco pointed out, "photographic models" - not partners or acquaintances ready to join Kern's previous porn play. As a result, Kern is repeatedly rejected and sent back into a professional or/and voyeuristic position. It could be argued, however, that there are some important continuities as well, and Foetus' soundtrack seems to underscore them. Indeed, the same combination of slow-dance "industrial" syncopated throbbing and controlled noise bleeding (characteristic of this hugely underrated band) permeates all the four segments, together with the SM imagery, suggesting that despite all those changes and the resigned frustration in Kern's face, the cameraman is just as evil as he ever was.

THE EVIL CAMERAMAN

OTOMO YOSHIHIDE LIVE AT THE ICC, TOKYO 09.03.2008

2010-09-16T20:41:00.000-07:00

Year: 2008

Time: 30 mins

Music: Otomo Yoshihide

Eye of Sound: To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the Intercommunication Centre in Tokyo (ICC), one of the leading experimental art locations in Japan, organised a free-entrance series of concerts featuring several cutting-edge performers from the local scene. The main attraction was Otomo Yoshihide, who delivered a tremendous 30 minutes performance on his prepared turntables. Almost completely rejecting the use of vinyl surfaces, Otomo uses amplified microphones and distortion devices to explore the possibilities of the turntable - not the record - as an instrument. The result is an impressive construction in which Otomo masterfully oscillates between serene, placid designs (refined in other projects such as Filament) and the violent feedback bursts for which he became known, all created in the electric interstices strategically placed between the record-player, the needle and the deck.

OTOMO ICC 2008

JACQUES GOLDSTEIN ERNST REIJSEGER: DO YOU STILL? (2008)

2010-09-15T06:26:00.000-07:00

Director: Jacques Goldstein

Year: 2008

Time: 42 mins

Music:

Ernst Reijseger

Larissa Groeneveld

Frank Van De Laar

Eye of Sound: Some artists choose, or are forced, not to jettison whole portions of their selves in the course of their work, embracing seemingly contradictory strands and sometimes succeeding in integrating them and diluting their apparent contrasts in a continuous spectrum of beauty. Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger stands out as a musician who manages to go down this road the hard way: without resorting to collage, counterpoint or wasted irony. The fact that he's worked with such opposite visions as Derek Bailey's and Yo-Yo Ma's, not to mention his regular excursions into musical fields lazily stringed together as "world" music, is perhaps the best possible description of his music: lyrical but fractured, his work disrespectfully transgresses the borders of jazz, improv, avant-garde, contemporary composition and popular music - all in a single note, with a single stroke. Jacques Goldstein's Do you Still? is a beautiful homage both to Reijseger's music and genre ambiguity. Though based on a trio live performance that focuses mostly on the lyrical side of the musician's soul (from his homonymous 2008 Winter & Winter release), it tries, and mostly manages, to balance the picture by capturing private solo improv sessions, both indoors and outdoors, that display Reijseger's mastery over different colours and tones - with the same astounding technique and soulful commitment. Interspersed with beautiful country- and city-side footage that evokes his ever contemplative music, Do You Still? also features intimate and sometimes bitter-sweet statements by Reijseger on his early years, "career" choices, mannerisms, anxieties and shortcomings. These different approaches, however, are seamlessly integrated into a serene, contemplative whole: neither a live-film nor a bio-doc or a visual essay, but all that and more.

http://www.fileserve.com/file/p2raUSn

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KZPO7ON7

PIOTR KAMLER DELICIOUS CATASTROPHE (1971)

2010-09-13T16:34:00.000-07:00

Director: Piotr Kamler

Year: 1971

Time: 12 mins

Music: Robert Cohen Solal

Eye of Sound: Polish animation giant Piotr Kamler is one of those artists who seem to obsessively return to the same themes and problems regardless of the necessary outer diversity of their work. In Kamler's case, the obsessions revolve around issues of existential and cosmogonical significance: time, repetition, fracture, creation, nothingness and the nesting of worlds within worlds. Délicieuse Catastrophe is one of his most intriguing and narratively hermetic works. Once again, Kamler collaborated with a GRM electroacoustic musician - Robert Cohen Solal in this case, whose beautiful soundtrack, oscillating between moments of sheer throb or repetition and deranging passages of freewheeling sonic burst, is as essential to the unfolding of the narrative as the director's enigmatic eyescapes. There's a pulsating rhythm that animates the world, a pounding ball that punctuates existence in its most monotonous cycles of repetition and apparent meaninglessness. Inside the ball lies the dimension of temporality and existential isolation, as if time is the condition for the breaking up of reality and the multitude of sensible forms. Once we have crossed diverse worlds, we reach an isolated platform in which our "character" lives, suspended over a red liquid of some sort. He moves back and forth, immersed in a series of repetitive tasks he himself probably doesn't understand, but of which he seems to want to escape. But he fails, alas, as there's no obvious escape from this dimension, and eventually returns to his monotonous existence. All of a sudden, however, a break occurs: something apparently created out of dirt is cast through the looking-glass and the mechanical cycle of repetition is shattered; the music of the spheres is now out of tune and we see our hero flying through a series of forms which quite clearly suggest female allures. An intruder, of the same shape we had initially seen encompassing our character's world, is now living in his previously lonely platform. He picks a horn to entice the mysterious intruder with its music and something unprecedented happens: they now both delight in its beautiful tones, and monotony has been broken. As if commanded by a higher voice, the man tries to return to his quotidian pointless tasks; but the intruder won't let him, craving for more music and delight. The hero complies, initially unaware that he is undermining the order of things. In the frolic of this newly-found meaning, the clock he carries on his neck is replaced by the same red liquid that now seems to boil around his platform. A deluge will follow, on which the artist will float, creating with his magical horn countless new worlds. The mechanicity of the cosmos has collapsed, and the thaumaturgical horn player now delights in his own creations. Whether through the presence of the previously encompassing female figure that invaded his platform or through his own creative power (which may, after all, be one and the same thing), he has escaped from the servile cycle of repetition that defined his vain existence.

- DEDICATED TO MR. LUCKY AND THE GLUCKLICH FAMILY -

Délicieuse Catastrophe

IVOR CUTLER LOOKING FOR TRUTH WITH A PIN (2005)

2010-09-09T11:30:00.000-07:00

Director: Paul Spencer

Year: 2005

Time: 59 mins

Music: Ivor Cutler

Eye of Sound: Perhaps it is appropriate that a documentary on Ivor Cutler shouldn't focus exclusively on what made him relatively popular: his music. And, in fact, Looking for Truth with a Pin does not pay particular attention to any of the other fields through which Cutler mischievously exorcised his inner demons and dreams: drawing, poetry, film, radio, children's literature. Although these are all briefly touched upon, Looking for Truth is, first and foremost, an attempt at a psychological sketch vaguely veiled in the conventions of biography. His childhood traumas, including a now humorous fratricidal attempt, are revisited once and again by Cutler himself and several artists and companions (like Robert Wyatt and Paul McCartney), all of them trying to understand the "terrifying sadness of the comedian" and the sources for his sometimes bitter joie de vivre. Critical moments are discussed at some length, such as his teaching years in an alternative school for misfits of all sorts, his Magical Mystery Tour flick with the Beatles or his long-time partnership with poetess Phyllis King, but the easy temptation of linear life-narrative, in which A explains B, is fortunately avoided. What is offered instead is a multi-layered, direction-free diagram of Cutler's psyche, interspersed with live footage and archival material - one that seems to run in circles instead of dishonestly pretending to have found the truth. His pythonesque humour and and child-like mischievousness are gayly portrayed but there are also some snippets of the unforgiving ageing process and its effect on the artist and the man. Several excerpts of live and TV performances displaying his unique brand of surrealist folk and existential humour are presented, making Looking for Truth an invaluable document for Cutlerologists and a fine introduction for newbies. It may be true that "a Scottish jew is an unbelievably heavy thing to be", but not if you truly believe in bugs.

Looking for Truth with a Pin

ELKE GROEN NIGHTSTILL (2007)

2010-09-07T15:06:00.000-07:00

Director: Elke Groen

Year: 2007

Time: 9 mins

Music: Dietmar Schipek

Eye of Sound: Groen spent two winters in the Dachstein mountain range in Austria, collecting footage of the unfathomable succession of nights, fogs and shades and the impalpable flow of the freezing Alpian winds. Built like an impressionistic poetic documentary, Nighstill explores the frailty and isolation of these apparently quiet snowscapes, elegantly using time-lapse to capture the invisible movements that imperceptibly sweep the mountain ranges every day: the moon rushing through the sky in an arch; winds oozing like fumes from the rocks; bright stars rapidly sinking into the ground; or the bulky cliffs being traversed by the thinest clouds. Against this seemingly unchanging cycle, a few scattered remains of human existence emerge: the ever-shining winter hotels, abandoned huts, cable cars and a human figure that manages to retain an illusion of permanence in the midst of the constantly shifting landscape. Subtly built into the screen, Schipek's soundtrack is a serene but dynamic montage of fragile organic drones, grainy but hi-fi crackles and processed field recordings that mute the violent wind blows into condensed sonic shivers that create the illusion of replicating the filmic action. Nightstill may perhaps be a misleading title for this hypnotic work: for, in all its beauty and serenity, it emanates an overwhelming sense of untamed motion and violence that stillness can't encompass.

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Nightstill

EGBERT MITTELSTADT UNFOLDING (2002)

2010-09-04T08:39:00.000-07:00

Director: Egbert Mittelstadt

Year: 2002

Time: 4 mins

Music: Fatagaga, Genom (Satori Hype)

Eye of Sound: German filmmaker Egbert Mittelstadt's Unfolding explores the beauty of motion and the way it can be seen to break the boundaries of the space-time axis. July Snow performs simple movements against a dark background. Her body does not move from her original place but, as time unfolds, it is seen to be spectrally spread over the scenic space. Future and past movements slowly parade through the dancer's body, a body that incarnates a sharp definition of the present in contrast with the temporal blurs that surround it. A vapourous soundtrack, punctuating a hissy drone with unsteady low-frequency rhythm events, supports the dancer's slow motion through time. A simple idea delivered with technical accuracy and beautiful results.

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Unfolding

IKUE MORI BHIMA SWARGA (2007)

2010-09-01T07:48:00.000-07:00

Director: Ikue Mori

Year: 2007

Time: 21 mins

Music: Ikue Mori

Eye of Sound: Loosely based on a section of the great Indian Mahabharata epic, Mori's Bhima Swarga (The Heaven of Bhima) is a riveting audiovisual exercise that uses mural paintings from the 18th century Kertha Gosha court in Bali to create a beautiful jigsaw of colour, glitch, figurative exoticism and plastic abstraction. The "original" Bhima Swarga tells the story of Bhima's excursion into hell (naraka) to rescue the souls of his father and co-mother and escort them to the gods' heaven. After fighting hosts of ill- and good-natured demons, Bhima and the remaining Pandava brothers must face the violent opposition of ill- and good-natured gods, who, though respecting the hero's resolve to fulfil his promise, cannot tolerate such an inversion in the established order of things. Bhima eventually dies in heaven but is restored to life and glory and given the amrut, the elixir of immortality. Pregnant with philosophical and eschatological significance, the Mahabharata narrative is not Mori's primary focus and is understandably sacrificed in the name of her aesthetic concerns; though these narrative elements are vaguely recognisable, someone unacquainted with the story will hardly grasp these basic guidelines and will instead be overwhelmed by Mori's impressive computer-genrated visuals. Bhima Swarga focuses on the on the beautiful mural paintings of the Kertha Gosha court, which are animated in ways that recall some sections of Paley's brilliant Sita Sings the Blues. But unlike Sita, Mori's Bhima is interested in the uses of visual distortion and glitch for the creation of new aesthetic possibilities. Source materials and backgrounds are corrupted, degraded and pushed to the limits; their integrity is not to be respected and even their figurative nature is often lysergically distorted beyond recognition. The soundtrack features Mori's trademark laptop gimmicks, proving how much the author has matured since her early adventures in electro-foam. A rich sonic palette evolves over the 21 minutes of the piece, ranging from dizzy-ambient sections to her more characteristic crystalline-yet-hectic rhythmical panning. There are a few short takes on the Balinese gamelan and raga traditions, but these fortunately turn out to sound more like respectful tributes than any form of exotic pillage or, even worse, new age pseudo-reverentialism. In the end, Bhima Swarga could hardly stand as a companion to the original Mahabharata story, but would certainly feature among Mori's most rewarding works.

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Bhima Swarga

PHILL NIBLOCK THE MOVEMENT OF PEOPLE WORKING PART 1 (1973-74)

2010-08-29T07:16:00.000-07:00

Director: Phill Niblock

Year: 1973-74

Time: 96 mins

Music:

Phill Niblock

with

Daniel Goode (Clarinet), David Gibson (Cello), Arthur Stidfole (Bassoon)

Eye of Sound: Shot in the mid-70s, The Movement of People Working has been frequently used as a visual accompaniment to Niblock's live music performances, and it is arguably both the least obvious and the best possible screen expression of his musical vision. The first part of the collection comprises four different 16 mm films (Trabajando and Sur, both divided in two parts) and, except for Sur Dos, recorded in Peru, all were shot in Mexico. The films focus on the almost tactile details of non- or semi-industrialized labor methods in these countries and are almost entirely composed of tight close-ups of hands (Sur) and bodies (Trabajando). Threshing, seeding, weaving, painting, carving or fishing, bodies and hands are set in a relentless and often impersonalized motion that creates a hypnotic tapestry of repeated gestures and diversified techniques of immense choreographic beauty. Niblock's soundtrack, recorded between 1975 and 1980, features the author's characteristic multi-layered "drone" immersions in which one radiant, glowing sound-object is sent into a dynamic but imperceptible chain of simultaneously minuscule and overarching transformations that constantly challenge distinctions between motion and quietude. Despite the apparent contrast between the two dimensions of labor, there is a deep but unfathomable correspondence between the succession of these bright fragmented images and the illusory continuity of Niblock's aural radiance: as if the slow, minute gestures of the hands and torsos that weave and thresh find an unexpected double in the tactile and intricate movement of the musician's workings.

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The Movement of People Working

GERHARD ERTL & SABINE HIEBLER DEFINITELY SANCTUS (1992)

2010-08-24T07:43:00.000-07:00

Directors: Gerhard Ertl & Sabine Hiebler

Year: 1992

Time: 3 mins

Music: Gerhard Ertl & Sabine Hiebler

Eye of Sound: Having worked on the fringes of Austrian film for many years, Ertl & Hiebler achieved some notoriety with their 2002 feature drama Nogo. Previously, the duo had been associated with a wave of Austrian filmmakers, like Gustav Deutsch, Peter Tscherkassky and Martin Arnold, who in the 90s were doing to cinema what many musicians were starting to do with music: digging through the memories of outdated artefacts and scrapping ready-made products in order to capture de-contextualized materials and subvert or reconsider the sources from which these had ben stolen. Definitely Sanctus focuses on a very particular set of sources - the tradition of Heimat films of the 50s - to reconstruct a highly coherent narrative about a successful reindeer hunt in the Alps. Set against a wicked soundtrack that mixes a continuous, almost hypnotic yodelling sample with a deep bass resonance, the film elegantly orders clichés from the cinematic pastoral fantasies of the 1950s without offering any explicit commentary on the materials: even the violence inherent to the sacrificial act or the religious ceremony that concludes it seem to be mere visual episodes that merit no more attention than the preceding sequences. Definitely Sanctus thus seems to be a strictly formal exercise in which the authors - legitimately, of course - do not offer any perspective on the internal logic of their materials; or, to put it differently, in which Ertl & Hiebler appear to be more interested in the lexicon of the Heimat film than in its grammar.

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Definitely Sanctus

NEGATIVLAND NO OTHER POSSIBILITY (1989)

2010-08-21T12:34:00.000-07:00

Year: 1989

Time: 58 mins

Music: Negativland

Eye of Sound: It's probably easy today to dismiss Negativland's activities as trifle, banal or plain stupid. They probably wouldn't be too uncomfortable with that, as they rarely claimed to go beyond the softest platitudes of the entertainment biz. But despite some recognition in some circles and some notoriety due to the famous copyright battle with U2 and Pepsi, the band is perhaps still to be acknowledged as one of the most relevant and prophetic projects in the 80s. In fact, from their first surrealist works on alienated concrète to their later sample-based beat palimpsests, Negativland paved the way for much of today's collage-centered pop culture as seen, for instance, in the increasingly common televised montages of political events and commercial samples for critical or humorous purposes. No Other Possibility, their first video work, showcases the band at a career threshold, before their U2ploitation move and just after their Christianity hoax. It typically explores the debris of American pop culture, dealing with automobile fetishism, televised preaching, halloween traditions, Marlboro masculinity, soft drinks and MTV. Featuring such iconic culture-jam figures as Reverend Dick, The Weatherman, Dick Vaughn or Crosley Bendix, it expands on the visionary concept of Universal Media Netweb and seamlessly jams live footage, TV excerpts, street interviews and home-recorded theatrical performances in a zapping collage that could well have inspired EBN's ZooTV show. From the brilliant Christianity is Stupid murders hoax to the magical significance of numbers, from lime soda to green slime and lung cancer, No Other Possibility stands as an entertaining essay on pop culture, tele-kinetics and media-noise. And there's also a small boy who, like most people, would prefer bands to have girls playing drums.

Note: This is the first official SOE/UBU collaboration.

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No Other Possibility

LUC PETER RECORD PLAYER: CHRISTIAN MARCLAY (2000)

2010-08-18T21:25:00.000-07:00

Director: Luc Peter

Year: 2000

Time: 42 mins

Music:

Christian Marclay

with

Elliott Sharp & DJ Soulslinger

Lee Ranaldo & Thurston Moore

DJ Olive & Erik M

Eye of Sound: Although the history of musical pillage certainly starts way before the 20th century, the practice of plunderphonics (stealing snippets of pre-recorded sounds, often leaving its sources perfectly recognisable, in order to create something new and normally at odds with its original purposes) arose with the broadening of the aural spectrum brought about by the musique concrète revolution of the 1950s. The fact that it took so long after the invention of the first recording devices to take this decisive step is probably due to the resilience of modern ego-centered concepts of authorship and individuality that, although still prevalent in face of all the contradictory evidence, gradually started weakening after WWII. Inspired by the roads previously paved by concrète musicians and theorists, but also heavily influenced by the worlds of performance art, punk rock and no wave, Christian Marclay was probably the first musician to steal the plunder from the academic domain and to consistently work on the possibilities of disarranging previously ordered sonic artefacts. Long before being a d.j. meant anything more than someone putting one record after the other to make people dance (which is still what it means today), Marclay was exploring old vinyl collections, scratching vinyl in ways unthought of by Bambaataa, destroying needles against turntables and breaking up records in order to discover what lies beneath the groove. In this fairly conventional documentary, Luc Peter offers us a short portrait of Marclay's activities in more recent years, at a time when he's been elevated to avant-stardom by a society reasonably accustomed to the ideas of a musician using ready-made sources or of someone commanding people's respect behind the decks. Marclay briefly discusses his background, methods and artistic purposes, together with considerations on the turntable/record as an instrument or its place in improvisation and pop music. Luc Peter complements those statements with footage from four live performances. The first one, recorded at the IRCAM in Paris, presents us Marclay as he became known to the world: playing solo with his prepared records and turntables. The remaining performance feature Marclay's more recent challenges, i.e. improvising live with musicians from fairly different backgrounds: downtown NY heavy-weight Elliott Sharp and young noise-turntablist Soulslinger at the Tonic; Sonic Youth's guitar men Ranaldo and Moore at the legendary Victoriaville festival; and finally Olive (of the "illbient" collective We) and Erik M (one of the most interesting turntablists of the post- Marclay/Yoshihide/Tétreault generation) at the Centre Pompidou. Record Player hardly goes beyond the intrinsic interest of his subject, which is always a good way to measure one's merit in making a documentary: it is unfortunate, in particular, that no attention whatsoever is payed to Marclay's work as a visual artist (which, as he says, is as much a reflection on sound as his music), that the mighty turntablist's past works aren't even mentioned, and that Peter wasn't able to tap into the artist's known theoretical verve. Nevertheless, Record Player has its strong points: it's clean and sober, it offers us a rare opportunity to see Marclay playing solo and with a few top-notch musicians, and - perhaps even more important and certainly rarer - it gives us a chance to see the man haggling at a local sale for a stack of cheesy old records.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=YXPGRM8X

JOAN JONAS VERTICAL ROLL (1972)

2010-08-14T19:20:00.000-07:00

Director: Joan Jonas

Year: 1972

Time: 20 mins

Music: Joan Jonas

Eye of Sound: Vertical Roll is one of those works that seem to surpass their own dimension. For decades, critics have been revisiting this classic video and, much like Persona's Alma when talking to a mute Elizabeth, finding new answers for theoretical problematics that seem to be, before anything else, of their own concern. Which is fine, of course: that's part of the critic's job. But this perhaps excessively theoretical approach has been neglecting aspects that seem vital to Vertical Roll's allure. The piece is structurally very simple: a horizontal strip, resulting from filming a TV set, punctuates transitions between frames to the sound of a hypnotically synched monotonous beat, while Jonas presents excerpts from her Organic Honey theatrical performances. These performances are all structured around the vertical roll that insistently sweeps the screen throughout the piece's 20 minutes, and are mostly framed in a spatially disruptive manner. All such performances seem to have a common theme: they all revolve around common representations of the female body and, therefore, of female sexuality when viewed from the outside, in a continuous flow that seems nauseating for both the performer and the spectator. Such vertigo, nevertheless, appears to derive not so much from the filmed performances but from the performances as they are locked in the film: indeed, the unstopping roll pushing the disjunct images upwards or downwards, synched with a minimal and almost unfloating beat that seems to cause the visual disruption, results in a mind-boggling experience that contorts perception without it being aware of the assault.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=MGI2PXGF

MICHÈLE COURNOYER THE HAT (1999)

2010-08-10T15:56:00.000-07:00

Director: Michèle Cournoyer

Year: 1999

Time: 6 mins

Music:

Jean Derome

with

Joane Hétu, Jean René, Rainer Wiens, Pierre Janguay

Fabieene Bélair, Normand Duilbeault

Eye of Sound: The apparent simplicity of The Hat's design hides a raw and violent tale of an untimely coming of age. We first see the hat covering a man's face whose body appears on the ear of a naked woman who dances to the sound of a sleazy funk beat at a strip club. The funk is gone and we now see the dancer as a child being approached by the hat. The hat then reappears as a hand moving up underneath her dress and as the ballet suit the little girl wears as a normal child. Back to the funk, we again see the naked dancer, surrounded by men with hats. Soon we are presented with an explicit depiction of the hat's latent significance: a phallic image, on a narrower level, but also a wider symbol of male violence and domination over women. Disturbing images of the dancer's body metamorphosing into a phallus seem to suggest that this exterior object is now an integral part of the victim's existence, while her appearance as a cigarette on the mouth of the man with the hat obviously alludes to her consumption by her abuser and her own combustion down this memory flame. As if it hadn't been explicit enough, Cournoyer concludes the film with a final depiction of the founding moment of this long-term incestuous relationship, a moment in which the relatively clean lines that make up The Hat become nervously and irreparably blotted and smeared. The music, created by Jean Derome with a host of musicians from the Canadian musique actuelle scene, is intricately connected to The Hat's narrative. The score moves swiftly between the sleaze beats of the strip-club (which are never as banal as proper strip music), short pizzicato sections depicting the victim's normal childhood in her ballet lessons, and dense, tense sound sculptures (sometimes recalling Frith's Technology of Tears) that add up to the latent violence of the narrative. The constant temporal and dramatic shifts of The Hat are ingeniously supported by Derome's score, which, much like the film's images, is based on transitions and metamorphoses rather than on cuts and contrasts - as if, as Chris Robinson pointed out, we're dealing with an endless rape or, in an alternative phrasing, as if no rape ever really ends.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DO65XUWY

NICO B. PIG (1998)

2010-08-09T17:23:00.000-07:00

Director: Nico B.

Year: 1998

Time: 22 mins

Music: Rozz Williams

Eye of Sound: What initially looks like a bleaker tribute to the noir tradition soon proves to be a disturbing semi-gore flick that seems to breathe the air of a cathartic confessional reverie. Nico B., known mostly as the founder of vintage erotica label Cult Epics, joins efforts with Rozz Williams (of, er, Christian Death fame) to produce an intense and potentially traumatic tale of ritual murder, sadism and sexual violence that seems designed not so much to shock as to exorcise (or simply exercise, i.e. act out) the personal obsessions of the author(s) - perhaps rendering it all the more shocking. Mostly plotless, Pig documents the last hours in the relationship between a sexually complex murderer and his apparently willing and sexually complex victim. The camera obsessively focuses on the details of the progressive degradation that leads to murder, managing to suggest a shared erotic significance without any direct allusion to it. Im many ways, Pig seems to be out of its time: the connections between SM imagery, sexual violence and ritualized or mystic murder, associated with the film's arty black & white and Rozz's "industrial" noise soundtrack, would locate Pig somewhere in the European pathos of the 80s. Such anachronisms hardly hinder the movie's disturbing realism and its obvious approaches to snuff territory. And, in the end, it may not be so easy to point out who's actually the Pig here.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=YFDCDQR6

JOELLE DE LA CASINIÈRE VIDEO ON CHANNEL (1984)

2010-08-07T06:13:00.000-07:00

Director: Joelle de la Casinière & Montfaucon Research Center

Year: 1984

Time: 9 mins

Music: Jacques Lederlin & Joelle de la Casinière

Eye of Sound: Video on Channel, of which The Sound of Eye is presenting a short excerpt, was an innovative and visionary project in the early 80s. Lead by legendary creative maelstrom Joelle de la Casinière, the project invited several video-artists to produce twenty short pieces of three minutes each. Its central concept was to collage video and TV footage according to a simple rule: the screen would be split in two or three parts, two thirds being reserved for video and one third for TV. More, these pieces had to follow a series of geometrical rules in the splitting of the screen, so that the same distribution of the visual field would be repeated over and over again. Finally, a TV channel, a magazine and a radio broadcast were associated to the project, probably making Video on Channel (Vidéo à la Chaine) the most multimedia-oriented work ever produced at the time. The excerpt presented here features three pieces, entitled "Fast Food", "Video Catalogue" and "Video Art". The first one juxtaposes footage of hamburger-related activities, rap imagery, sports, explosions, etc. Jacques Lederlin reads a poem by Casinière in which sentences are constantly rearranged to make a statement on the relation between fast-food and video, both recently introduced in Europe by then. Lederlin's voice is given a rhythmic flow that makes it resemble a faux-rap, all the more displaced due to a cold sample-based instrumentation that sounds like Dreyblatt trying to enter Grandmaster Flash territory. The other pieces feature Casinière's voice set against samples and rhythmic structures that strongly recall Ikue Mori's works of the 90s. In "Video Catalogue", Casinière's poem shuffles what seems to be a video-shopping advertisement for lamps, while the screen contrasts images of sports and fauna with expensive-looking design chandeliers. Finally, "Video Art" juxtaposes the concept of video art with surveillance cameras, producing an almost Farockian comment on CCTV as "art on art" and "double entry art".

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9HUC55A0

TAKESHI MURATA UNTITLED: PINK DOT (2007)

2010-08-04T15:44:00.000-07:00

Director: Takeshi Murata

Year: 2007

Time: 5 mins

Music: Robert Beatty

Eye of Sound: Set against a hypnotic crescendo of looped layers of high-pitched electro-bliss that sounds like something Ikeda and Aube would produce over a calm breakfast meeting under a soft summer breeze, Pink Dot is a somewhat less abrasive approach to the Murata trade-mark digital corruption wash. Some critics will have a lot to say about the pulsating pink/blue dot that keeps assaulting the screen, associating it with "the eye of perception" or "the viewer's ego", but Murata's force and relative popularity lies in the simple and almost brute force of his distortion apparatus and the constant game of hide and seek between figuration and abstraction that his source materials are forced into. In Pink Dot, Murata invites none other than John Rambo to his glitch chamber, making his ruthless enemies draw first blood in the swampy and moisty miasma of a pixeled war theatre where explosions created by lysergic grenades go pink and the jungle becomes an ectoplasmic aquarium in which the quintessential Vietnam anti-hero is camouflaged by his own digital irreality. There are no friendly civilians.

Dedicated to Comrade Yotte

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=JT7DH4FS

HENRI STORCK SCENES FROM OSTENDE (1929)

2010-08-03T04:29:00.000-07:00

Director: Henri Storck

Year: 1929

Time: 11 mins

Music

Joachim Brackx

Els Mondelaers

Hermes Ensemble

Eye of Sound: A landmark in the history of moving images, Scenes from Ostende is one of the most beautiful and less surrealist films by Henri Storck. Which need not imply any form of cinematic realism. Quite the contrary: Storck's camera and editing aim at pure constructions of rhythmical and visual abstraction, both gradually unfolding as the film progresses. There is at the same time a documental aspect to Ostende, with clear temporal and spatial borders, and with a thematic focus that excludes the whimsical, symbolic or aleatory imagery associations that characterize much of the early surrealist cinematography. Ostende ("east-end") is a port-town in Flanders, washed by the cold waters of the North Sea, and Storck proposes a documentation of its landscapes and argonauts: thematically organized in six sections, the camera elegantly moves from the port and anchors to the wind, the dunes, the foam and, finally, the North Sea. Composed in 2008, Brackx's soundtrack closely follows the rhythms and kinetic waves of the screen and offers a different movement for each of the film's chapters. Each of these sections seems to offer a commentary on its corresponding theme, forming a parallel narrative in which the North Sea is presented as a release from land and its anchors. The more abstract, "free" and moving sections are those on foam, wind and dunes, while the anchors are given an almost lugubrious tone by its stark, mechanized strings. Finally, the longest section, comprising almost half of the film, focuses on the North Sea and reprises the opening section on the port: Mondelaers sings a beautiful poem in which the sea is said to be "more beautiful than cathedrals" and to offer a "death without suffering". Brackx thus captures and underlines what seems to be the latent signification of the images' poetic progression from land to sea - a creative interpretive gesture that is not only rare in scores for silent films but also, I believe, tremendously accurate.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=YN8HF9P0

MARIA BEATTY THE BLACK GLOVE (1997)

2010-08-01T02:58:00.000-07:00

Director: Maria Beatty

Year: 1997

Time: 27 mins

Music: John Zorn

Eye of Sound: No kinds of love are better than others. I suppose that most true BDSM enthusiasts may feel that Beatty's films are too arty, too slow, too glamorous and too soft for their own onanistic or viewing taste. And I bet that they appeal more to a sexually conservative crowd than to the average SM porn consumer. Beatty herself is a legend in "the field" as a performance artist, and is known to be an enthusiastic submissive practitioner. The Black Glove focuses precisely on the submissive end of the relationship, acted out by a character/actress named TV Sabrina, while the dominant character, known as Mistress Morgana, is far less explored by Beatty's camera. The film benefits from an insider's knowledge of techniques and fantasies and, despite its general "softness", may shock some viewers for its explicit shots. The gorgeous black and white footage is comparable to the finest noir movies, and part of the film's glamorous aura owes much to it. Despite this general glamor, also supported by model-like performers, I believe that The Black Glove is also an intentionally disturbing film that proposes a not so peaceful gaze at the world of domination, submissiveness, and the dark forces behind human sexuality. John Zorn's score is certainly responsible for much of this unsettling result: a sober, fireworks-free concrète collage of single-note tones and hi-fi field recordings that range from humming voice arrangements and snippets to fiery and watery soundscapes. On their own, perhaps, the images and the music could be more psychologically neutral, but their combination results in an unsettling, however fascinating, experience.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KVWJWLIZ

PETER COLLIS STAGGERINGS (1996)

2010-07-29T09:43:00.000-07:00

Director: Peter Collis

Year: 1996

Time: 6 mins

Music: Peter Collis

Eye of Sound: In this beautiful short film, Peter Collis contrasts footage of the natural world with its disintegration under digital manipulation processes. Using stills as his main source material, Collis creates illusions of movement by splitting the screen in different layers of clarity and distortion, by using the traditional rostrum camera, and by contrasting high definition black and white pictures of flora with their corrupted or glitched avatars. Collis' beautiful visual compositions are supported by a haunting digital soundscape in which field recordings and elusive sonic sketches are craftly combined and edited in order to produce a somehow unsettling aural drift. A very beautiful film.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=OOATZ99G

BARBARA HAMMER SANCTUS (1990)

2010-07-26T20:43:00.000-07:00

Director: Barbara Hammer

Year: 1990

Time: 18 mins

Music: Neil Rolnick

Eye of Sound: Sadly reduced by hype machines to a pioneer of "lesbian cinema" (whatever that means), Barbara Hammer has a long career in creative and critical filmmaking, constantly trying to find new narrative forms and technical possibilities to offer the world a personal view on such themes as physical disease, media, gender, sexuality, age or health-care. In her 1990 short Sanctus, the main point seems to be the time-honored dictum of the body as a temple, or, as the author put it, of a body in need of skeletal protection from a corrupting and diseasing environment. Hammer used old x-ray footage, rearranged, colored and orchestrated through optical printing, in order to reveal hidden bodily movements and rhythms in its constant juxtaposition. Rolnick's soundtrack is a characteristically hectic electronic piece in which choral (probably religious) music excerpts are mutilated, stretched, rephrased and rebuilt in ways that sometimes allow us a glimpse of the original materials but more often than not chop them beyond recognition. Its highly artificial and surreal timbres should be known to anyone familiar with Neil Rolnick's synth antics, although it could be said that this piece is perhaps more complex and rich than most of his works from this period. Although frequently returning to their sources, both Hammer's images and Rolnick's music seem to make a gradual progression from more or less discrete shapes to progressively more abstract territories in a movement that sometimes could be said to lead us further inside the authors' subjects and themes. In all its beauty, enchantment and delirious dynamics, Sanctus is a truly overwhelming piece.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=WG6VS7K8

FRANK SCHEFFER KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN: HELICOPTER STRING QUARTET (1995)

2010-07-22T23:31:00.000-07:00

Director: Frank Scheffer

Year: 1995

Time: 81 mins

Music

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Arditti String Qaurtet

Eye of Sound: Dedicated to all astronauts, Helicopter String Quartet was composed for a very classical formation, the string quartet, in a very unusual setting: four players in four different flying helicopters, synchronized by means of voice signals and click marks. Stockhausen once had a dream. He was at some high-class party where he didn't feel welcome, and he just wanted to fly away from there. He suddenly starts flying in the air and through the objects, performing an elegant flight that mesmerizes the tuxedo-clad party guests who had snubbed him before. This was, the composer says, the very origin of this controversial piece. And throughout this fascinating documentary we see Stockhausen joyfully narrating the many signs, premonitions and supra-rational events that lead him to compose the piece. Many ideas merge in Helicopter: the dream of flying, music as a flying object, the double goal of translating the helicopter floating pitches into a score and integrating them in the recording, or the spiritual connotation of the flight. There is an overt spiritual quest in Stockhausen's composition, but this modern mystic must come to terns with his earthly dimension and become entangled in the mundane details of material reality in order to achieve an approximate translation of his dream. We thus are presented with a sample of the painstakingly meticulous rehearsals with the Arditti String Quartet and the immense technical challenges posed by the extravagant idea of putting four musicians playing together in four different helicopters. Stockhausen's joie de vivre and childish enthusiasm is evident throughout the film. There is, however, a key moment in the film in which the composer betrays an enormous inner angst: asked, during the dress rehearsal, to compare his dream to its practical fulfillment, Stockhausen doesn't fail to notice the obvious contrast between the freedom he felt in his dream and the heavy burden of technical and practical issues that surround him and somehow keep him from enjoying the moment. A grimace of sad resignation is then briefly allowed to take over his face. This is perhaps one of the strongest points about Scheffer's film: more than a simple documentary about an unusual avantgarde performance, fascinating as it may be, it is also a narrative about a man driven by messages from the unconscious, sticking to his vision by means of premonitions and rigorous hard work, but finally recognizing the vacuity and failure inherent in his attempt to make his dream come true.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=CF2LET3S

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=OQ7L1AJG

STÉPHAN AUBÉ IANNIS XENAKIS: REBONDS B (2004)

2010-07-20T01:14:00.000-07:00

Director: Stéphan Aubé

Year: 2004

Time: 15 mins

Music

Iannis Xenakis

Pedro Carneiro

Eye of Sound: A very short but interesting documentary following the recording of Pedro Carneiro's interpretation of Xenakis' Okho, Psappha and Rebonds, three highly demanding pieces for percussion. The first part is a recording of a performance of Rebonds B in a Parisian church. The second section offers a brief insight into the recording process of such pieces, exploring technical and artistic issues surrounding the production of Carneiro's interpretation. Differences between recording and performing are briefly addressed, centering on the need for the creation of dynamics and contrasts that are unreachable in the performance hall. The figure of the producer, so often neglected outside the field of pop music, is highlighted before turning on to short statements about Xenakis' music, its mathematical apparatus and its profoundly physical nature.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ITRXB7MJ

PIERRE HUYGHE A JOURNEY THAT WASN'T (2006)

2010-07-18T22:22:00.000-07:00

Director: Pierre Huyghe

Year: 2006

Time: 23 mins

Music: Joshua Cody

Eye of Sound: One of the reasons why we travel (and why we so easily fall prey to the lure of travel literature and its many current avatars) may be, as anthropologist M.J. Ramos once said, sheer disgust of urban sedentarism or, to go a little further, of home and the self it tends to define. Bringing the journey back home, of course, is as old a trick as it gets, but it's the only known way to surpass its sadly narrow temporal limits while clinging on to our domestic comforts and egos. Huyghe's A Journey that Wasn't was a musical show staged in Central Park, NY, conjuring memories and representations of a trip to Terra del Fuego in Antarctica. The purpose of the journey was as modest as it was classic: to discover an unknown, un-topographed island and, with luck, an hitherto unknown species. But this was not as quixotesque as it sounds: in fact, global warming has been melting away the poles' ice shelf and revealing previously unchartered islands and ecosystems, and there were even rumors of a strange new elusive white animal living on its shores. Huyghe and his crew eventually found the island and set up a research station in order to translate this virgin land's shape into sound by means of morse code. The animal, an albino penguin. was indeed located and recorded on camera. Later, in 2006, Huyghe set up a "multimedia" show in Central Park evoking this pioneering journey and recreating its icy landscapes: a spectacle of light, ice and music, which is partly documented on this film. Joshua Cody, renowned composer and student of such heavy-weight names as Boulez, Murail and Andriessen, offers yet another entrancing musical translation - this time, a translation of the topography of the island, recorded through sound-probes during the expedition, and here recreated as a contemporary musical score. Unknown islands, unknown no more.

http://rapidshare.com/files/407724498/journey.mp4

RON RICE CHUMLUM (1964)

2010-07-17T20:59:00.000-07:00

Director: Ron Rice

Year: 1964

Time: 23 mins

Music: Angus MacLise with Tony Conrad

Eye of Sound: Somewhat reminiscent of Cohen's Thunderbolt Pagoda, but more refrained, compounded and elegant, Chumlum was shot during the making of of Jack Smith's Normal Love and features such "stars" from the Factory/NYC underground as Beverly Grant, Mario Montez, Tiny Tim and Smith himself. As in Thunderbolt Pagoda, actors are depicted in pseudo-oriental costumes, engaging in orgiastic feasts and general dolce fare niente hammock ethics, in what seems to be an endless opium sea-trip under the signs of sensual imagery and gender ambiguity. Chumlum's forte is, as you may have guessed from the pictures, the constant superimposition of images, veiling each actor and scene behind another and fragmenting the screen's integrity to a point in which background and foreground are often no longer discernible. Limbs and faces pile up in disruptive forms, creating collages we thought possible only in animation films. Dimensions accumulate layer upon layer, and even individual layers often comprise several levels of visual depth, actions being constantly hidden behind a translucent object of some sort. This intensive nesting of dimensions could well be like a sea-sickening trip, and part of the reason why it isn't may be found in MacLise's soundtrack. Unlike his contribution for The Thunderbolt Pagoda, where more was thought to be more and the final result sounded like a huge soup bowl where any ingredient could be added without altering the global flavor, MacLise's journey into exotic tunings and instruments is here very focused and restrained. Played with cembalo (and barely audible tablas) under the musical direction of Tony Conrad, MacLise's Chumlum is a solid take on minimalism in which micro-change makes dissonance and consonance lose their significance. Strange as it may sound, it is perhaps MacLise's pattern-repetitions that hold Chumlum together and render its dangerously vertiginous multi-layered movements a soothing experience.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=TFI05MMH

EVELINA DOMNITCH & DMITRY GELFAND CAMERA LUCIDA (2007)

2010-07-16T14:35:00.000-07:00

Directors: Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand

Year: 2007

Time: 47 mins

Music

Taylor Dupree & Richard Chartier

Alva Noto

Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand

Alexander Kaline

Asmus Tietchens

Kenneth Kirschner

Matmos

CoH

Carter Tutti

Eye of Sound: Another essay on the eternal synesthetic dream of translating sound to image. But Domnitch's and Gelfand's project is far more ambitious, for it attempts to forfeit any representational, symbolic mode to achieve a "natural" - as far as possible - visualization of sound waves. There have been several experiments, of course, many of which artistically rewarding, but most have been focused on virtual exercises of some sort. On the contrary, Camera Lucida is presented as a "sonic observatory" in which musicians are allowed to visualize sound waves transformed in light by means of complex utilization of the natural phenomenon of sonoluminescence. The above picture of the Camera Lucida prototype depicts a transparent chamber, filled with a gas-infused liquid, on whose walls there are ultrasonic transducers that generate frequencies which are then rendered visible by the chamber's contents. A pre-made interactive composition is the chamber's sound source, by which the performer can produce and modulate sonoluminescent events after its translation into ultrasonic sound waves. Several musicians were invited to explore the Camera Lucida, producing a surprisingly diverse array of soundscapes which somehow reflect each artist's sensibilities and aesthetic inclinations. The most interesting pieces are, for my ears, Dupree's & Chartier's Specification, a calm but intense exercise on metallized artificial timbres and windy hisses, and Tietchen's Camera Lucida, with its multi-layered subtle echo palette. The remaining works manage to stand as engaging adventures with this sonic observatory, focusing on static noise, crystalline sonic-lines and decayed aural detail. The only exception is Alva Noto's Sonolumi, which somehow manages to be as boring and uninspired as most of his works - which is, perhaps, a relief: despite working within a limited set of acoustic possibilities, the Camera Lucida experience is rich, flexible and human enough to allow talent to emerge where it exists.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=VS9TAXY0

GUNVOR NELSON TRACE ELEMENTS (2004)

2010-07-14T22:18:00.000-07:00

Director: Gunvor Nelson

Year: 2004

Time: 9 mins

Music: Gunvor Nelson

Eye of Sound: Born in Sweden, veteran filmmaker Gunvor Nelson was one of the leading forces in the San Francisco avant-film scene of the 60s and has over the past 40 years erected a very personal filmography solidly dedicated to studies on image and sound. Trace Elements is a short formal exercise in which the camera moves around a room, exploring the almost tactile surfaces of a decaying wall with a constant sense of bewilderment and restless hesitation, as if the camera never does find, as John Sundholm has said, its target. Nelson's own body is constantly present, its shadow insisting on merging with the other shadow-forms reflected on the walls, perhaps as a mark of a self-reflexive stance. Such shadows are compositionally juxtaposed with excessive light, creating in its relation with movement and editing multiple surfaces that constantly elude a clear spatial resolution, the only exception being brief intermissions in which the distorted colors of flowers almost violently erupt into the screen. Nelson composed the soundtrack herself, a flickering and spacious electroacoustic soundscape in which low-key field recordings, synth color tones, voice fragments and quasi-lyrical instrumental events are quietly made to flow into and out of the walls, allowing silence to punctuate the piece's movement and introduce subtle nuances in the aural rapport with the images. Both visually and sonically, Trace Elements stands as a work of both immense maturity and daring experimentation, a combination possible only to artists who have reached higher levels of control over their selves.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=3AF39IU0

SHARON LOCKHART TEATRO AMAZONAS (1999)

2010-07-13T21:05:00.000-07:00

Director: Sharon Lockhart

Year: 1999

Time: 39 mins

Music: Becky Allen

Eye of Sound: One of the most aesthetically rigorous and fecund artists in contemporary experimental filmmaking, Sharon Lockhart has been confounding boundaries between cinema and photography for over three decades, complementing her tight formal exercises with an ethnographic sensibility rarely found on the screen. Teatro Amazonas is undoubtedly among her most radical and intriguing works. The setting is an opera house built in Manaus during the rubber exploration boom of the 19th century. The audience in this Fitzcarraldo utopia, presumably unacquainted with the kind of music to be performed, was personally selected by Lockhart herself. comprising locals descending from both native Amazonians and Europeans. Hidden and fixed, the camera records the audience watching a performance of a musical piece by Becky Allen, specially commissioned for the event. Allen's piece is a powerful minimalist work for choir in which acoustic space, initially overtaken by the singers, gradually gives in to silence - or, to be more precise, to the audience's own choral noise. A sound mass initially emanates from twelve invisible groups of five musicians intoning one single note in vowel cycles, vanishing imperceptibly till only one of these groups is left, therefore allowing the audience's presence to slowly emerge in all its boredom and discomfort. Lockhart thus forces a series of identifications on the part of her "ideal viewer": on one level, of course, it is a matter of observers observed, of viewers viewing viewers, both probably restless to the same degree; but on another level there is also a perhaps uncomfortable identification of the urban bourgeois viewer with the director, the composer, the (secretly local) choral group and the camera, somehow mitigating the previous identification. The way in which this strange triangle, composed by the artists and the two spectators, is designed to shift between such identifications endangers some of the most basic and unconscious notions of gaze hierarchy and fixity which are at the very heart of both the ethnographic and cinematographic enterprise, forcing us to reconsider, if only for a while, our own place in the trinity.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=IWKKS8B6

TOM HOVINBOLE NOR NOISE: 12 PORTRAITS ABOUT NOISE MUSIC (2004)

2010-07-12T21:18:00.000-07:00

Director: Tom Hovinbole

Year: 2004

Time: 119 mins

Music: Francisco López, Otomo Yoshihide, Jazzkammer, Merzbow, Toshimaru Nakamura, Supersilent, Tore H. Boe, David Cotner, Lasse Marhaug, Deathprod, Nordic Miracle, John Hegre, ARM, Hakon Kornstad, Alexander Rishaug, Fe-Mail, DEL, Helge Sten, MBD, Michael Duch, KA, Kai Mikalsen, Jan de Gier, H.C. Gilje, Arne Borgan, Ivar Grydlland, XYZ, Ingar Zach.

Eye of Sound: Noise, live, stomachs, history, silver, pop culture, texture/structure, Dada, limits, typos, politics, Schaeffer, found objects, ego, Ground Zero, detachment from sources, individualism, vultures, human/non-human, chaos, Koenig, aggression, sex, concrète, Varèse, improvisation/composition, birds, Painkiller, Futurism, catharsis, consciousness, process, ISO, punk, overload/minimalism, frequencies, name dropping, Throbbing Gristle, decisions, John Cage, phenomenological immateriality, lineages without contact, heavy metal, sampling, academic/popular, AC/DC, definitions, indefinitions, Sonic Youth, spoken-word, no voice for Merzbow, conflict, Link Wray, rhythm, little knowledge of history, Cologne, Russolo, industrial stuff, Boyd Rice, collage, Origami Republika, physicality, pretentious kids, jazz, surrealism, Xenakis, quotations, perception, Velvet Underground, Japan/Europe, performing/listening, Schoenberg, psychedelia, melody, Non, Francisco López seems to have more to say than all the rest put together, happy noise, Tony Conrad, bourgeoisie, analogue/digital, Fluxus, cut-up, Pierre Henry, we have no theory/we just do it, Stockhausen, equipment, cassette culture, Boredoms, accuracy, representations of space, Sachiko M, repulsion, Boulez, sound objects, fetishism, feedback, silence, music.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=G51ESVNT

FRANK ZAPPA / ENSEMBLE MODERN THE YELLOW SHARK (1993)

2010-07-12T00:01:00.000-07:00

Director: Egbert van Hees

Year: 1993

Time: 90 mins

Music

Frank Zappa

Ensemble Modern

Eye of Sound: Recorded in 1992 in Frankfurt before an ecstatic audience, The Yellow Shark features a less popular facet of Zappa's repertoire. His commitment with avant-garde and "modern classical" composition was evident since his first albums with the Mothers, but chance, market cruelty, and questionable aesthetic options by Zappa himself condemned him to be remembered mostly as a prankster and a "guitar-hero" for stoners with a penchant for difference. But Zappa was much more than that, of course, and this concert, combining new compositions and new arrangements for older material, must be considered as essential as his first Mothers adventures or his 80s incursions into synth-based musical utopias. Tremendously difficult to play, Zappa's compositions are here performed with an alarming ease, rigor and focus by the renowned Ensemble Modern: just have a listen at G-Spot Tornado, composed for Synclavier and part of the magnificently surreal Jazz from Hell synth-album, and see how technically demanding changes of tone, breath and color are dealt with by this strangely swinging Ensemble. There are (only) two typically Zappaesque takes on brechtian satire, but throughout the concert it is rewarding to see a contemporary music ensemble that not only knows how to swing but also to tackle Zappa's theatrical antics. More lively, organic and "real" than Boulez's take on FZ's universe, this Yellow Shark just might be the definitive orchestral Zappa experience.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6JLOSZWL

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=3W4ZDR9J

ROBERT MUGGE SUN RA: A JOYFUL NOISE (1980)

2010-07-10T20:36:00.000-07:00

Director: Robert Mugge

Year: 1980

Time: 60 mins

Music: Sun Ra & His Arkestra

Eye of Sound: Just when A Joyful Noise is starting, the Helio Lord appears in a museum Egyptian exhibition and states that "knowledge is laughable when attributed to a human being". This could be taken as a wise, humble remark, but remember that Sun Ra claims not to be a human being. The film focuses on Ra at his most eccentric. There are many excerpts of live shows, private performances and rehearsals, but Mugge's intention was to tap into the Ra ideological framework rather than attempt a conventional musical documentary. From this point of view, it's not easy to assess Mugge's success in documenting that strange force called the Ark Myth. Ra presents himself as a catalyst, an agent who changes everything without being changed; he prescribes himself as a therapy against modern day alienation and proposes a personal mythocracy to transcend the vices of democracy and theocracy. Quite clearly, there are signs of acute megalomania - at least if you assume that he's indeed a human being. And sometimes we are left do decide if his whole cosmic narrative is a joke, a statement/performance, or plain simple pathology. Like any prophet worthy of the name, Ra has his retinue of followers and disciples. Musicians like John Gilmore, Danny Thompson and James Jacson narrate some episodes from their interstellar adventures with Ra and justify their surrender to their leader's idiosyncratic rules and visions - some with epiphanies, others with a humbling recognition of Ra's mystery. Like any good apostles for a higher being, these men seem to revel in their submission and proximity to the Helio Lord, and the Ark crew is portrayed like a bizarre mixture of trippy commune, spaced-out religious cult, and plain good old jazz orchestra. We don't get a clear picture of this uncanny cult, but it's also unclear if a more complete or coherent portrait was possible. Ra insists on eluding us; as he says, he's not a part of history, he's a mystery.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=T996U6X0