fumare permesso

John Waters' PSA for the Landmark Nuart in Los Angeles...


Ecoplex cinema program for the 2010 Golden Plains Festival is here

Sven Libaek - Solar Flares (liner notes)

Antipodean tones for mental healing. AD 1974, and launched from beneath the Southern Cross, these easeful midnight notes of writhe-time funk describe a singular document of Australian space jazz. Skipper Libaek navigates starlight spaceflight by that fourfold twinkle; his crew - the brightest luminaries of local session players - stretch out & settle into orbit.

Norwegian-born Libaek was already a young veteran of film and television scoring in his adopted homeland, lending an outsider's ear to striking interpretations of the alien landscape. At the prompting of his publisher, Southern Music, he recorded My Thing, an LPs worth of stock music for their Peer Southern imprint. The licensing sucess of that record led to this outer-space-themed successor.

This album's synthetic enhancement heralded a uniquely Australian innovation: the Qasar II duophonic analogue/digital synthesizer. Sydney inventor, Tony Furse, had designed the modular keyboard unit with R&D funding from the Australia Council, and resource support from Don Banks at the Canberra School of Music. Perhaps heard at its best on the eponymous track 7, the Qasar II delivers not only wobulating funk, but devastating treatments of George Golla's electric guitar lines. Libaek utilised the Qasar synths extensively across soundtrack recordings for the Boney and Inner Space television series; Furse would later partner with fellow Sydney entrepreneurs and inventors on the development of the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument...

(etc etc etc!) ...
So I had to scare up some infos on this synth. Sven remembered only that it was a kind of Fairlight prototype, but the session dates put this quite a few years in advance of the CMI.

I rang Rob Fox (who is a genius, if you hadn't already realised this).

"Australian-designed and manufactured analogue synth. Recorded in Sydney, '74. Probably a one-off model. There's a Fairlight connection. What is it?"

And the Fox: "Hmmm, well if it was recorded in Canberra it could be the Qasar... That one was an analogue Fairlight ancestor, but I don't know of any recordings. Apparently it had a unique sound; something to do with the circuitry [at this stage, I'm thinking: bingo!]... Don Banks also had a Moog IIIA there... And in Sydney, and around that time, all I can think is that it would be an ETI 4600 - which is also the first synthesizer I built myself. They used to sell in kit form. There were a lot of custom-mod varieties, so it could be one of those..."

So I hit the infobahn. ETI 4600 is a fascinating instrument, right era, and a Fairlight link in designer Kim Ryrie. But the epiphany was the title of synth workout, track 7: Quasers. OK! A clue... So, looking around for background on the Qasar, I discover an earlier (non-Canberra-based) model. One of these, near as I can figure, somehow came to be a frequent visitor at Spencer Lee's studio. Libaek's 3 vinyls are perhaps the only commercially-released (and this one, not so commercial at that) recordings made with it.

Here's what it looked like:

"Second variety":

Damned useful website, with infos of Don Banks' EMS & the Qasar, can be found here

Anyways. Its available now, on lobe-enhancing vinyl, from Votary Disk. Limited to 500.

Somehow I wrote the liners (which I like to think are not so shabby) in an all-night writing jag between 2 days shaking at the end of a jackhammer, at the end of a week working on a construction site... I emailed them in, caught a quick shower, wolfed a bowl's worth of cereal & made straight to work for the 7am start.

Delirious with lack of sleep... I remember the foreman giving me some instructions later in the morning: I tried not to blink-my-eyes-open too gratuitously, and hoped my swaying side-to-side was not disconcertingly noticable.

Lunch time. I put a new pair of earplugs in. "Please don't wake me till we're back on". Folding my head into my arms on the table. The power of nap!

So. Quitting time, later that afternoon... Sean Healy pulls up in a borrowed ute: we hit the road & head for the Golden Plains Festival site... So I can install the outdoor cinema. Keerist...!

Golden Plains 2009: Ecoplex debrief

some words from the JJJ morning show

photos at Ben Butcher's keyhole camera blog

Rod Cooper & the Vessel crew prepare for launch

(best documentation of the actual performance is by way of avi files - will upload to youtube as time permits)

testing my new data projector at twilight: Zbig Rybczinski's I Can't Stop

digging on Quintron & Miss Pussycat

all photos this page courtesy of Sean Healy

Outlands Ecoplex cinema: Golden Plains Festival 2009

I Need That Record!
The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store...

Straight from the US for its Aus premiere at GP, Brendan Toller’s guerilla doco’ laments the lost & beloved indie record retailer; more than 3000 disappeared in that country within the space of 5 years. Peopled with a cast of righteous brothers & sisters - Noam Chomsky, Thurston Moore (SY), Ian Mackaye (Fugazi/Minor Threat), Mike Watt (Minutemen/reformed Stooges), Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith Group), Legs McNeill (punk) etc etc – knocking their lobes together on whyfor this storefront species became so endangered...

http://www.ineedthatrecord.com
The Vessel Project
Expanded Cinema performance insania by Rod Cooper & crew

“Broken music marooned with ghost-ship transmissions...”

Most ambitious project yet from this experimental musician & instrument builder (Cooper) & his crew of all-around ratbags & ace characters. The skipper’s new caper is a landlocked metal ‘boat’ with home-made instruments built into the decking panels: springs, strings, percussion & electronics... pirate shortwave broadcast from the rigging, and films projected into the sails. Ahoy, idiophones!

Rod Cooper – skipper/maniac, Dale Chapman - electronics, John Jacobs - radio navigation, Riky Metisse Merlow – automated sound sculpture, Anthony Magen – organised noise, Michael Prior – disturbances, Hugh McSpeddon & Richard Oremek – signals/projection, Gab Carazo – general hand
http://www.pool.org.au/users/the_vessel_project

The Drum Buddy Show

By way of celebration the great man & his gal’s appearance for GP09... “Rock, noise & electronic experiments finally took a trip to dance class”: a pre-Katrina infomercial for Quintron instrument of choice & patented invention, The Drum Buddy! This 5 oscillator, light-activated, mechanically-rotating drum machine is the direct link between the human hand and sheer electronic voltage! Taped live (in front of a studio audience) at the Spellcaster Lodge in New Orleans’ 9th Ward, this classic late night infomercial transports you from the classroom of a local high school to the stage of a late-night rave. Starring: Quintron, Miss Pussycat and her puppets, MC Trachiotomy, the Drum Buddy Dancers, and legendary R&B recording artist Ernie K-Doe. Hosted by Bob Global and Rebecca Simms for Midwest International Industries; directed by Rick Delaup.

http://www.quintronandmisspussycat.com/
PLUS: (YES!) A WHOLE BUNCH ELSE!!!

Golden Plains Festival 2009 website

Once more, into the bush...

GOLDEN PLAINS FESTIVAL 2008 - OUTLANDS ECOPLEX CINEMA

Rituals of the Captured Moment
Feature-length monsterpiece of outsider-vision by Nylstoch. Probably the most destroyed film ever made in Aus. Not for the puny-lobed...

Helmethead

Rod Cooper & Anthony Magen

“Semi-visible mental furniture of the ‘helmet-head’; a literal dream-screen...”

Expanded cinema performance insania from this experimental musician & instrument builder (Cooper) & all-around ratbag/landscape architect (Magen).

Around The World in 80 Minutes

Live Cinema Performance by Jean Poole

Continent hopping cinema under the stars, slowly spanning the globe with weird and rare clips, animations, tv snippets, instructional videos, internet oddities, edits, remakes and remixes all cobbled together live with a microphone, audio effects unit, laptop, dvd player and video mixer. Expect karaoke sing-a-longs, E.T. in the Middle East, custom animated overlays, South American psychedelia, live overdubbed sound effects, commentary & soundtracks, perverse Japanese TV gameshows, live video remixing and effects, Star Trek as reimagined by various cultures, skateboarding monkeys, banned Australian TV, wrestling octopi and all kinds of crowd participazioni~!

PLUS: the usual garbage sandwich of idiot cinema (that only a mother could love)

Timecapsules Thursday 8th March

TIMECAPSULES

Thursday 8^th March, 8.30pm

ABC GALLERY
127 Campbell St
Collingwood

Expanded Cinema by Trans-Tasman Renegades

Sam Hamilton & Eve Gordon (NZ), “Light-mantled sooty albatross” 25 mins

4 modified film projectors/1 destroyed guitar/2 good humans... NZ champions of creative cinema preside over the marriage of abstract sound & image: marmite abstractions conceived in the shadow of a searchlight sweep. Veterans of collaborative activities with the likes of Damo Suzuki & the Tall Dwarfs, organisers of the Auckland International Film Festival’s fps program, Golden Plains Festival guests.

Grin without a Cat (Le fond de l'air est rouge)

Chris Marker : 1977/1993 : 179 mins

Scenes from the Third World War 1967-1977: Marker’s eulogy for the New Left, spanning from the Vietnam war to the downfall of the Allende government in Chile, via uprisings in Prague, Paris, and sundry other points about the globe. Artfully engaging essay film leavened by Marker’s typically ironic wit (he took his surname from Magic Marker pens), with an original soundtrack by Luciano Berio.

“Marker has a genius for poetic aphorism and the documentary equivalent of the bon mot… More impressionistic than analytical, A Grin Without a Cat is a grand immersion.“ – John Hoberman, Village Voice

“A Grin Without a Cat is a work of extraordinary journalism, but it is also a work of deft and subtle poetry, visual as much as verbal.” – David Kehr, New York Times

“One of the most towering & extraordinary films to grace the screen.” – Phil Hall, Film Threat

“It reconfirms Marker as one of the most serious-minded & artistically gifted filmmakers in France, or anywhere else.” – David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor

Gold coin donation …
... Bar at pub prices

Dean's Timecapsules program

inaugural Golden Plains Festival, March 10-12th 2007

Ecoplex Cinema - Golden Plains Festival 2007

Festival website, here

(link to cinema program, via sidebar menu...)