Marinetti OST CD launch, Weds 9th December

Marinetti (ACMI screening, & OST CD liners)

Albie Thoms' Marinetti was the culmination of the synthetic environments that the UBU group had pioneered in Australia; festive public 'happenings' that combined the energy and volume of creative rock and jazz with the mesmeric effect of multi-dimensional lightshows. Another kind of culmination: Marinetti records most of the principal collaborators in the UBU film group, like Aggy Read and the Perrys. Uniquely valuable as a document of Australia's late 1960s counter-culture, the soundtrack provides the best indication of the unrestrained liberty that bands like Tully and the John Sangster Underground band - some of whose members perform on this recording - were famously achieving in their improvisations of the period.

This is the sound of the acid-stained Down Underground. Led by the irrepressibly eccentric multi-instrumentalist, John Sangster, the sextet of players included veterans of Sydney psych ensembles Tully and the Nutwood Rug Band, as well as accomplished sidemen from the Don Burrows and Bernie McGann groups. By the time they improvised the soundtrack recording to a screening of the film, guitarist Michael Barnes was performing alongside Sangster for the Harry M Miller production of Hair. Tully mainstay, Rick Lockwood, can be heard on flute, sax, and a raucously untutored violin. New Zealand expatriate, Dave McRae, would further explore the sound of organ enhanced by outboard effects in his later work with UK jazz-prog group, Nucleus, and Daevid Allen's post-Soft Machine Matching Mole; for several years he was musical director for British comedy series, The Goodies. Drummer, Alan Turnbull, was a member of the classic Burrows quartet. George Thompson, on bass, would record again with Sangster in support of Sister Janet Mead's landmark album of inspirational christian pop.

The inital tone of the soundtrack is idyllic in its gentle lyricism, and the naive candour of overheard conversation. Across the next 80 minutes Harry Medax builds the mix - up to 6 additional tracks woven over and around the musicians - towards a crescendo of cacophonous simultaneity... Birdsong and the barking of dogs collide with fragmented needle-drops of The Doors and The Beatles. There are whispered reassurances, anguished shouts, and the wholesale reprise of Thoms and Gerry Dupal's musique concrete composition, De Moon Service, originally realised as accompaniment to sculptor (and computroid, from ABC TV's SciFi series, Interpretaris) Gordon Mutch's film, Hallucinagenia. A moment of Ravel's Bolero, start of reel 3, wryly harkens to one of Thoms' earliest shorts.

Beyond the threshold of conscious perception, Thoms launches his audience into a maelstrom of sound and vision. The group delirium unspooling in the dark is consistent with his notion of a 'cinema of cruelty': the resort to a course of homeopathic madness prescribed by Antonin Artaud. The film certainly has people; 'characters' even, and aplenty - but no actual characters as such. Rather than something as facile as telling a story, the film is a distilled concentrate of lysergic impression, a sacrament of celluloid metaphysics.

(et cetera etc!)

40th anniversary screening, Saturday afternoon at the ACMI. Director, Albie Thoms in attendance. Not for the puny-lobed!

And: premiere release for the soundtrack, on CD from Roundtable - new joint venture of James from Votary, and Jeff from Round and Round Records. Available at the screening this weekend.

Details of launch party to follow...

Shortly: even more unimagined Sangster gems, pried from the archives...

the king of beards & concrete mixers: pierre henry

"... Everyone should try to attend a performance by Henry at least once. It's the kind of experience you emerge from believing you will never quite hear sounds in the same way again. Attendance should be mandatory for every every indie rock musician, just so they realise the utter futility of their existence."

(from this page at The Guardian. I thought of it tonight, when I was confronted by some Facebook spam: 'Ian Wadley would like you to become a fan of ian w'... sorry, but I'd honestly rather not. Instead, I hope that Ian enjoys a long hard listen to everything that Pierre Henry has ever recorded.)

I heard something like 40 concerts in Europe, & by a country-simple reckoning the 2 diffusions I caught from Pierre Henry were way-and-ahead the highlights (this includes a 4hr set by Kocani Orkestar in an old factory, 2000 wasted Croats & I dancing on a floor of broken glass - sufficiently so that a white line (salt!) around the legs of my jeans marked the extent of that night's saturated sweat...)

The Henry gigs were the centrepiece of the last 2 nights of a week honouring the memory of the French choreographer, Maurice Bejart, for whom Henry had been composing since the 1950s. The image above is Bejart & Michele Seigneuret dancing for Henry & Schaeffer's Symphonie pour un homme seul, in 1955 (colour stills below are from Louis Cluny's stunning film of the following year).

Each of the 6 Henry diffusions is a different 1hr set: a near-complete survey of his works that Bejart had adapted for dance. The earliest 50s pieces are convulsively dynamic - servomechanical sounds & brut-harsh edits, with audio principally generated on prepared piano. Pieces from later that decade suggest what was to follow in the 1960s: oscillator sweeps & sine waves enter the mix, as the pieces become more textural & less frenetic, making greater use of audio filters, albeit still punctuated by artful 'noises'. Beyond this span of years are a handful of more populist anomalies - Messe pour le temps present, the Rock electronique finale of La Reine verte, and the cartoon SFX-enhanced Tokyo 2002. (this last, by way of an unscheduled encore on the closing night, as a rejoinder to the capacity audience's rapturous applause).


Pierre Henry is on his way to his 82nd birthday; his age is starting to show. He gets about in a wheelchair, mostly, then discreetly shuffles his way to the mixing desk, front of stage, after the audience have taken their seats. Despite his years, he seems (in conversation with what I think was his daughter, Isabelle) completely lucid. As much as it must have pained him, he struggled to takes his bows after the show; clearly, he loves the attention of his audience. At the conclusion of the 5th evening, I figured these concerts to be a public swansong - but after witnessing him sympathetically bouncing in his seat to Psyche Rock the following night, I felt little doubt that Henry will be stalking concerthalls for as long as he's physically able. By the end of that piece, and the closing Tokyo 2002, all 24 faders had found their way to maximum volume.

(Henry working with the Bejart company in 1977: Machine Danse)

Opening performance each night was Futago for 2 dancers, choreographed by Bejart-veteran Emmanuele Huyn to Henry's Psyche Rock: absolutely ridiculous, I was desperately choking back laughter (& arrived sufficiently late on the final night to be able to miss it altogether). Far more convincing is the evening closer in Bejart's choreography for Variations pour une porte et un soupir, performed by the National Opera Ballet of the Rhine.

Bejart's choreography is informed by contemporaneous (1965) aleatory principles: each of the 7 dancers draws a numbered piece of paper from a glass box at the start of the evening's performance. That draw determines which dancers (or 'Rien', none, or 'Tous', all) will perform to each movement of the work.

The dancers perform physical improvisations from their repertoire; sometimes incorporating the chairs, or the supine bodies of non-performing colleagues, as props. Across the 2 nights, its possible to see both the range of individual gestures that the dancers are able to bring to Henry's composition, as well as the collaborative moves they test on each other (Respirations one night sees all 7 dancers united in an unwieldy spider-like huddle - a beast with 7 backs).


Interviews with Pierre Henry, here and here

Annotated biography listing his opus

more on this season (in French) can be found here, here and here. Contrary to advertised program, the diffusion of the 27 Avril soiree was Variance II, Coexistence, Signes, and Rock electronique (from La Riene verte), rather than Le Voyage. Liberation also ran a pre-show piece

Another useful post

Jack Ellitt bio - BFI GPO set, Vol 2

Jack Ellitt was the anglicised and vernacular name of Avrom Yitzhak Elitski, born to Lithuanian Orthodox Jews in Manchester, 1902. Moving to Australia 3 years later, Ellitt’s parents early determined on a legal career for their son. In response, he ran away at 15, supporting himself as a farm labourer and jackeroo. Upon return to Sydney, he won a scholarship place to the New South Wales State Conservatorium, studying piano and violin. Rather than compete with his peers for keyboard or string duties in the school’s new orchestra, Ellitt took up the bassoon for their first concert: the Australian premiere of Gustav Holst’s The Planets (a work Ellitt would later abbreviate for the score of Lye’s The Birth of the Robot).

Ellitt and Lye first met in the constrained bohemian circles of 1920s Sydney. Lye was stoking and shiphanding his way to the cultural epicentre of the old “Mother Country”; Ellitt, recently graduated, was gigging in orchestra pits for vaudeville. Libraries gave them a restless sense of what was happening beyond the diminished horizons of then-Australian culture. Both were avid for the cultural renovations of European modernism, and the provocative theories of Marx and Freud. Both were keen amateur anthropologists, stalking the tribal artefacts of the Australian Museum. The pair tested their roughhouse cerebrations at pubs in The Rocks, and between swims at Bondi.

Lye made his abrupt departure for the UK, and at his correspondence-urging Ellitt shortly followed; by 1928 the pair were domiciled in a wharf-bound barge loaned by the writer, A. P. Herbert. Lye and Ellitt maintained a regime of physical fitness by regular swimming in the Thames (suggesting they might previously have been members of Sydney’s “polar bear” club, of perennial all-weather surfers). Herbert also found them work as stagehands at the Lyric Theatre, with Ellitt performing in pubs and teahouses on the side. When Lye began work at animating Tusalava, he entrusted Ellitt with the composition of a live soundtrack...

(etc)

available February 2009 from the British Film Institute

L'oeil ecoute: on sound-image correspondences

The Parmegiani box arrived at the end of last week: 12 CDs, bi-lingual booklet. And despite its mammoth scope, even that is far from a complete survey of this king-of-beards' acousmatic experiments. Over at the Avant-Garde Project, you can find his early Danse on Ilhan Mimaroglu's comp of GRM sonorities, as well as Generique and a revised version of Ponomatopees from the Electronic Panorama box. If we assume that Danse (1964) is representative of those early works that are absent from these douze discs, we haven't missed out on so much. But despite a couple of revisions-for-LP-record (the afore-mentioned Ponomatopees, and Pop'eclectic), his soundtrack work has been largely omitted.

One Parmegiani soundtrack included in its entirety is his 1970 L'Oeil Ecoute (The Eye Listens); a stunning work, tho' sadly the only existing copy of the video has been damaged - so we can only guess at the images that accompanied this tour-de-force of brut extremity.

Anyways. I've been thinking on this great & very thoughtful piece by Colin Black for RealTime. And he's right: within the (local) concert and festival circuit, there's a definite tendency to privilege the audio-visual over the purely sonic... Or the purely cinematic, for that matter - something which plenty of experimental filmmakers would take a definite issue with. Stan Brakhage is (was) perhaps the most famous, but there are plenty of others and a couple of them live locally.

(Ultimately, Black does exactly that thing he's bemoaning: he fails to discuss, even in passing, the actual sonic qualities of works. This doesn't diminish his argument, but it does reflect on a general failure of Australian "music criticism" to engage with its subject in a meaningful way. Yes; for sure we can debate about funding and programming policy. But: surely we're mature enough to begin a robust discussion of this country's creative music? The works, and the artists, deserve that as much as the audience.)

Thinking on Black's article reminds me that both of Bebe Barron & Tristram Cary have recently passed for other-planes-of-there. 2 pioneering figures of electronic music: no question. Both of them produced what are arguably their most memorable electroacoustic works as soundtrack commissions.

... and its worth remarking upon: excepting for the Columbia-Princeton academy (and even there), much of the initial post-WW2 experiment in electronic music was paired to the expedient of soundtracking. The GRM & the BBC Radiophonic Workshop... even "pure" research facilities at Darmstadt, Utrecht, Tokyo, Moscow, Milan & Warsaw (etc) were producing works for radio broadcast. Tod Dockstader began as a film editor, did cartoon SFX, and eventually wrote Tom & Jerry cartoons. 1 of the 2 musique concrete pieces that Boulez produced at the GRM became a soundtrack. Its a facile statement, but the technology suggested its own outcomes: Sci-Fi film & animation scores, radio plays & horspiel.

Brakhage nailed it when he spoke of his filmwork employing a musical structure; in the absence of a literary narrative, its the most obvious way to 'decode' his cinema. Maya Deren used the analogy of poetry - but in the classic sense, & again not far removed from what we understand as music.

This analogy also functioned in the other direction. The "logic of successive images" provided composers with the means to arrive at new structural models for electronic music, which often owed little debt to existing creative forms.

Neitzsche (via John Hartmann) identifies the analogic function as one of the singular powers of the human animal: "first, the nerve stimulus is transformed into image (thus leaving dreams as originary writing?). Second, the images become sounds, or words. Language, which is so pervasive in our human existence, is thus the second level of metaphor. Finally, there is the transformation from the sonic realm back to the conscious, as the sound/word becomes the concept."

So. Hardly suprising that this correspondence between sound & image should be so prevalent: it makes quite a lot of obvious sense.

Ultimately, I'm still essentially in agreement with Colin Black. But beyond the qualification outlined above, there's an obvious historical rejoinder:

(graphic score by Parmegiani; possibly for Capture Ephemere?)

extra infos:

Ant Pateras & Rob Fox's MIBEM deserves singular mention as an event with an absolute attention to sonics, above & beyond a/v concerns...

... Absolutely pitiful obituary for Tristram Cary in The Age, merely reiterating the errors of the AAP feed. No, he didn't compose the Doctor Who theme - Ron Grainer came up with a melody, & Delia Derbyshire made the electronic realisation of it. Grainer thought her realisation was so far removed from his original idea to be wholly Derbyshire's own - but BBC Radiophonic protocols attributed the credit to him (Derbyshire was merely employed as a technician!). And: the suggestion that contemporary studio pop - hip hop, techno, etc - "wouldn't exist" without Cary is risible in its exageration. The first electronic pop music was actually created in Australia back in 1951, and within a few years there were other, & more ambitious, works in both Holland & the USA.

(Contrariwise: the CreateDigitalMusic site has superior obits for both Barron & Cary)

Final, -like: Andrew Ford reprises a 1hr interview with Cary from 2005, available as a stream or MP3 DL from the The Music Show website... Cary's influence on Australian music culture is difficult to determine; he brought the likes of John Cage & Henk Baadings out here, then left them stranded in Adelaide?

the spiral gouge

DJ gigs upcoming:

2 nights for the Melbourne International Biennale of Exploratory Music:

Monday 31st March
Tuesday 1st April (ha!)

Corner Hotel, Richmond

(killer & sensational line-up for all shows, dedicated attention to sonic qualities etc - mandatory attendance!)

some correspondences: Grandieux>>Lynch>>Bunuel>>the Spanish Civil War

(reverse order)

Y/day, one of the local op shops yielded up a book on the Spanish Civil War. Interesting fact at p. 53:

"... after the collapse of the Bourbons in the Napoleonic Wars, the Church, gaining popularity from its championship of the opposition to Napoleon, became the centre of resistance to liberal ideas. Its most violent protagonists grouped themselves into the Society of the Exterminating Angel."
(Hugh Thomas, "The Spanish Civil War" 1961 Penguin p/b)

Which would merely serve to confirm something already well known (I guess): Bunuel's films are taking place in all kinds of amazing metatextual arenas. The quote above provides a wry joke on the 'protagonists' of another Spanish drama, his El Angel exterminador (1962) - suggesting a sinister motive for that seemingly innocent bourgeois dinner party. Bunuel's fantasy of revenge on Falangist conspirators? Maybe...

Anyways, Bunuel was alike to David Lynch (and very few others) in that he often took responsibility for sound chores with his films. Lynch is more given to ominous timbral mass; Bunuel's soundtracks are punctuated by a sly form of sonic surrealism. I treated with some of this for the 'cognitive dissonance' series for The Night Air (ABC RN), & Aranda makes mention of it in his Bunuel bio-crit... But listen to some of the off-camera but diegetic sound effects in (especially) The Milky Way or The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie & you'll hear what I mean.

Whether consciously or not, Lynch's most recent (& remarkable) feature, Inland Empire, owes a considerable debt to a film by Philippe Grandieux of a couple years previous: La Vie nouvelle. This is true not just of both the audio-image technique, but also of its seedy reckoning with a sexuality that might encompass prostitution and violence, and a disjointed narrative structure that never completely explicates just WTF?!? is actually going on. Both films might be surveying a certain kind of mental landscape; the margins of LA, in the case of Lynch's film, and a darkly visioned underbelly of former Iron Curtain countries (the presence of the UNProFor peacekeepers suggests Sarajevo) in the Grandrieux... what the situationists used to call 'psychogeography'.


Lotsa links:

Exterminating Angel review on Slant

some Bunuel action from senses of cinema

Calanda's Bunuel Centre

Religion in the films of Bunuel

Inland Empire homepage

Adrian Martin on La Vie nouvelle, at KinoEye

An interview with Grandrieux, from Martin's Rouge

Another piece on La Vie nouvelle and more, here

Toronto Psychogeographical Society

Psychogeography and the derive, by Sadie Plant

Filmanthropy 1: Sweet Movie (OST)

Disappeared from the imdb listing for the film, but Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie was among a number of films maudite produced by the production company, Filmanthrope.

Filmanthrope were responsible for some of the finest European art/freak cinema of the late '60s thru mid-'70s; Themroc, & works by Alain Tanner and Marco Ferreri.

Sweet Movie is, for me, the pinnacle of Makavejev's filmmaking - clever, creative & fun in equal measure. It also documents a uniquely aspirational moment of the continental counter-culture, with a narrative thread involving Otto Muehl's aktionist crew, and a Pierre Clementi who was already the veteran of work for Bunuel & Pasolini.

Composer Hadjidakis was a partisan for rebetika, and is uniquely responsible for elevating it to greater esteem in Greek culture. He also popularised the bouzouki, and was an early champion of fellow composers, Mikos Theodorakis & Iannis Xenakis. Thus, while he was a cultural nationalist, he also did much to promote Greek modernism - as in the song cycles he adapted from the poetry of native surrealist, Nikos Gatsos.

By the time of this soundtrack commission he had substantial experience of film scoring, having won the US Academy Award for Never On Sunday (1960). I've come across quite a few of his recordings on old vinyls, but for my ears this is easily the finest of his works - the perfectly bittersweet complement to Makavajev's colourful monsterpiece of whimsy & tragoedia: a libertarian sono/cine-manifesto.

Music & lyrics : Manos Hadjidakis,
except 4 & 8 : lyrics by Makavejev & Ann Lonnberg

1.Ta paidia kato ston kampo (2:42)
2.Oi paragkes kai oi anthropoi (1:30)
3.Serenata gia thn sexoualikh apousia (3:16)
4.Is there life on the earth? (2:35)
5.H sexoualikh polyrrythmia (2:07)
6.Oi paragkes kai h kefalh toy karl marx (2:56)
7.Nyxterino (3:24)
8.Is there life on the earth? (1:04)
9.Ta paidia kato ston kampo (3:37)
10.strip tease gia tria paidia (4:47)
11.nyxterino gia dyo fones (2:22)
12.o xoros ths sokolatas (2:39)
13.ta paidia kato ston kampo (2:31)
14.h sexoualikh polyrrythmia kai ta tria paidia (3:01)

Additional music : Les Chants Révolutionnaires du Monde – Les Flûtes Roumaines

download the Sweet Movie OST here

... the imdb soundtrack listing details a couple other tracks, not on the commercial OST release:

• "Réel de L'Arrivée", Dominique Tremblay and Denis Boucher
  
  
• "Macho", Music by Pierre Dutour/Lyrics by Santiago El Ghi
  
  
• "Bandiera Rossa", Record: Chants Revolutionaires du Monde

Some links:

An interview with Dusan Makavejev

The new Criterion DVD release - with David Sterrit's essay

Details of the original Greek soundtrack release

Julien Mazaudier's essay on the soundtrack (in French)

... both this, and Makavayev's previous film W.R. Mysteries of the Organism, are informed to some extent by the theories of Wilhelm Reich - principally, "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" and "The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality" - some info on him, here, and a hilarious photo, here

Thanks to Joel, from Brisbane's OtherFilm Festival, for originally gifting this soundtrack to me... Cheers, ears!

Submariner Cinema 2: Jean Painleve & Pierre Henry

The link, below, is to the soundtrack of Painleve's Amours de la pieuvre (Eng: Lovelife of the Octopus) - as scored by Pierre Henry, and released on bootleg 45 from maybe a decade ago. Sound quality is tending to indifferent (it derives from a VHS release, and the occasional pitch-shifts are the result of it being played on a sketchy video deck). Jpegs are from my own design; the original B&W photocopy sleeve was a little rudimentary , & I had a lot more discretionary time back then... (not that this isn't also quite rudimentary: glue & scissors paste-up!)

Anyways: the year is 1965. Henry has left the GRM a couple years earlier, a not entirely amicable departure from the Schaefferian fold. This was produced at his own Studio Apsome. The brief except of "Song of the Volga Boatman" was added later by Painleve - something Pierre Henry was apparently less than happy about. (Not sure why; perhaps Painleve'd made a new edit, the film was running a little longer, and he needed to pad the score. Or maybe he figured to enhance the film's popular appeal by dropping some actual "music" into the mix. I don't know.)

This is probably the most outlandish soundtrack produced for a science film to that point - and aptly so, the octopus is a fairly remarkable critter & the ample proof is in the film image.


Love Life of the Octopus - OST bootleg 45