Fragmented Films Dec 09

Epsilon is incredible. On the one hand it’s an insult to the science fiction genre, limp unimaginative and cringe inducing, yet on the other it’s such a freak oddity that it will make your brain melt. As part of the 6 disc Rolf De Heer Collection (Umbrella), which encompasses his first six films, it combines some extraordinary images of sped up humanity, not unlike koyaanisqatsi, then jams it kicking and screaming into a ridiculous narrative about a superior (female) being (with a broad aussie accent) arriving on earth, encountering a good natured ocker outback bloke and debating the horrors of humanity before falling in love. It’s stilted cringe inducing death on celluloid. De Heer puts the duo in matching shirts and shoots it like it’s Neighbours. It makes you wonder how he could have been responsible for the dark wit of Bad Boy Bubby two years earlier, or even the understated beauty of Dingo (1991), which stars jazz legend Miles Davis, who you’d be positive hadn’t seen De Heer’s previous film when he signed on, the woeful 1987 outback horror Incident At Raven’s Gate. The only horror here is that they gave him money to make other films after this turkey. Yet that’s De Heer in a nutshell: hit and miss.

Wake in Fright (Madman) is a film about assimilation whether you like it or not. It’s Lost Weekend by way of Deliverance, except in the Australian outback the evil yokels don’t play banjo and make you squeal like a pig, no it’s much worse than that, they get you shit-faced and take you roo shooting. The residents of Bundanyabba are grinding down English primary teacher John Grant with bogan redneck Aussie hospitality, until he loses not only his smug superiority, but everything else he thought he stood for, descending into alcohol fueled oblivion. This is outback horror, the residents of ‘the Yabba,’ the equivalent of zombies clawing at Grant, trying to make him one of them. Made in 1971 it’s one of the most vicious and confronting Australian films around. The words “Is this your first time in the Yabba? So how’dya like the Yabba?” will chill your blood.

Samson and Delilah (Madman) is a love story without words. In the extras writer/director/cinematographer Warwick Thornton suggests at 14 he didn’t have Hannah Montana’s monologues, he threw stones at girls. It’s bleak, austere and set in an Aboriginal community in central Australia, not pulling any punches, particularly in terms of petrol sniffing. But it’s a different kind of love, one that is faced with much more difficult, gritty and harsh obstacles than your normal cinema affords. It’s a two disc set, the second features Thornton’s previous shorts and a great behind the scenes feature with the actor playing Samson participating in a diversionary youth justice group conference apologising for a burglary he committed a year earlier. Believe the hype.

He Ran All the Way is a classy 1951 noir that transcends the premise of a killer holed up with an innocent family and becomes a fascinating rumination on family and trust. It was a film tainted by the House Un American witch hunt in the 50’s. Soon after the director John Berry fled to France, it was star John Garfield’s last film dying at the age of 39 after much harassment from Mcarthy, and it was written by Dalton Trumbo (Spartacus) under an alias, in jail at the time of release for refusing to name names. It’s part of an excellent four disc box set MGM Film Noir (Aztec) that also includes Orson Welles patchy yet still compelling The Stranger with Edward G Robinson, Robert Wise’s classy heist gone wrong Odds Against Tomorrow with Shelly Winters, and hard man Robert Ryan, as well as the inspiration for Dragnet, He Walked by Night.

Bastardy (Siren) is a portrait of the complexity of Melbourne’s Jack Charles, actor, musician, heroin addict, homeless, thief, criminal, and member of the stolen generation amongst other things. He begins by shooting up, saying “If I hide anything it wouldn’t be a true depiction.” And what we get is the charm and ravaged potential of a man who justifies burglaries in Kew as ‘hunting and gathering on prime Aboriginal land’ starred in The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith and has battled drug addiction for thirty odd years. Seven years in the making, this is raw unflinching intimacy.

Tom Waits – Glitter and Doom Live (Anti/ Shock)

Tom Waits live is a larger than life vaudevillian skit, a skid row poet and junkyard experimenter bred in the good ol’ days when the entertainers had done the hard yards and had true grit. His voice these days is all grit, rougher than ever, one of the most distinctive and immediately recognisable sounds in modern music. Age and perhaps a few unhealthy nocturnal pursuits have irrevocably seared his vocal chords and the sandpaper growl that comes from deep within his weary blackened belly is the loudest and most powerful instrument on this disc. It’s so over the top, so immense that it’s hard to imagine that it could ever have come from a human being. Yet the emotion is palpable, it’s the cry of his wounded soul, of someone who has seen too much, been too close to the flame, yet somehow survived to groan out the tale.

It’s an eclectic mix of tunes, definitely not a greatest hits collection, Waits delighting in dusting off some of his forgotten and obscure bastards and parading them alongside his more recent hits. Thus songs like Singapore from Rain Dogs and Lucky Day from his forgotten opus The Black Rider, appear alongside a jazzy version of I’ll Shoot the Moon or Goin out West from Bone Machine. There’s also a fair degree of reinterpretation, making the tunes new again, the highlight being Bone Machine’s Dirt in The Ground, which is slowed down, losing its rasp and turned into soothing late night jazz which is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking. It gives you goose-bumps every time you listen. Get Behind the Mule is almost hip hop and Make It Rain, one of the greatest songs he has ever written gets the audience clapping along to the beat, causing those pesky goose-bumps come into play again. It’s a bizarre and eclectic collection, 17 tunes cobbled together from 2008’s US and European tour that includes a second 30 odd minute disc of his between song banter/ stand up comedy tangents that are hilarious. It’s a collection that continues to demonstrate what this peculiar 60 year olds last album Real Gone told us, and what we’ve felt for the last 20 odd years – that he’s smack in the middle of his musical prime.

Bob Baker Fish

Fragmented Frequencies Dec 09

There’s a sound, it’s brass, but it’s more than just brass, it’s the low end. It doesn’t just hit you, it goes right through you. It’s tuba, and it’s funky as hell. You might even say it swings. To find it you need to go several hundred km North East of Bucharest in Romania to the village of Zece Prajini. It’s hard to find because it’s not on any map, nor is there a sign. There’s not even a train station. Luckily for the locals the train stops for a couple of minutes so you can jump off there if you choose. It’s here that you can find the most amazing gypsy band on the planet. A German, Henry Ernst stumbled across them in 1996 after 15 odd years of traveling aimlessly through Romania. On his return to Germany he sold everything he owned and toured them through Europe. For them it was a chance to escape ‘this misery,’ to Ernst it was a revelation. He formed the label Asphalt Tango and continues to put out their music and that of a slew of other Balkan artists to this day.

The band is Fanfare Ciocarlia and they’ve just relased Live (Asphalt Tango/ Planet Company), 16 dangerous breakneck slabs of gypsy brass recorded live in Berlin in 2004, with an accompanying DVD of the same concert, as well as their previously released Brass on Fire feature, which shows the band rehearsing in their wet muddy and very cold looking home. The music is of course high energy, swirling, invigorating, intensely sad at times, at others nothing short of life affirming. It’s music steeped in tradition, yet they play with the speed and potency of punk rock. ‘Do you like it?’ they scream in halting English during the concert and the audience just erupts. It’s truly amazing that these 12 balding middle aged Romanian men could be responsible for such joyous feats of musicianship and beauty. In the film we see them in their village and it becomes clear that they’ve decided to build a church. Running low on money they tell the priest that they’ll just have to tour again so they can finish it off. So they did. They even came to Melbourne earlier this year as part of Gypsy Kings and Queens tour with Indian, flamenco, and Macedonian musicians and the results were nothing short of incredible. If you like music with soul and energy you need to track these guys down. If the speed and agility of the music doesn’t get you the tubas certainly will.

So you may be aware that the What is Music Festival is back again after a low key room full of noisy musicians last year. Tonight they’ve got the experimental night from Horse Bazaar Stutter programming and we see experimental legend Jon Rose, famous for playing outback fences, some improvised music from Clayton Thomas (double bass) and Claire Cooper (Chinese Harp), some kind of weird electronic stuff from Japans Hercel, and Poland’s Anna Zaradny who has a very stranage installation going on under some stairs on youtube, but who knows what will happen live. Thursday features a bit of laptop noise from the USA’s John Wiese, who they suggest will ‘obliterate your very being,’ alongside various local noise merchants. Though saturday is where the weird turn pro. 50/50 at the Iwaki Auditorium Southbank features 50 bands playing in 50 minutes, one minute each, no breaks. We’ve got everyone from Curse Ov Dialect, to Rank Sinatra, to Agents of Abhorrence, Candlesnuffer, you name it, there’s experimental, jazz, noise, rock, metal. It should be amazing, or shit, or both. Check www.whatismusic.com for full program details.

Finally Melbourne multi media Philip Brophy’s fetish for anime has been widely documented by, well, him, in his book 100 Anime. He’s just released Beautiful Cyborg 2 (Soundpunch), an ongoing series of musical portraits for key Japanese anime figures. The music is hysterically twee and artificial, quite electronic, an exploration of what he describes as ‘that gleaming white plastic heart at the centre of Japanese pop culture.’ It coincides with three other releases from Brophy including a new scores to experimental films and an easy listening muzak work comissioned by the Melbourne Planetarium.

Fragmented Films Nov 09

There’s something very wrong about a guy who gets his daughter to star in his latest film and then shoot a nude shower scene, adding a further layer of perv, to what is equal parts kitsch and creepy. We’re talking Italian horror maestro Dario Argento here, finalising his supernatural trilogy of Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980) with 2007’s Mother of Tears (DV1). Argento has always loved excess, overwhelming and confusing his audience with vivid colours, baroque imagery and insanely loud prog rock music. The plot in his hands is just a convenient way to connect the elaborately staged hyper gory murder scenes. It’s murder porn but it has style. Here the murders are crueler, more abrupt, the art in the gore, not the staging. With Asia Argento (Transylvania), Udo Kier (Suspiria) and a bunch of folks that look like they just stepped out of a Human League music video, it’s as insanely excessive as the other two, but somehow it doesn’t quite connect. That’s despite the joy of Claudio Simonetti‘s (Goblin) music and the opportunity to witness someone being strangled with their own intestines.

Sauna (Asylum), is heavy on the atmosphere, gorgeously shot, bleak and menacing. It’s set in 1595 after the bloody and brutal 25 year war between Finland and Russia. It begins with this awful sense of dread and doesn’t let up, following the weary battle scared warriors who have devoted their lives killing and defiling, now charged with marking the border between Russia and Sweden. In the middle of a swamp they find a mysterious uncharted village filled with the elderly and one solitary child. Nearby is an imposing concrete sauna that is said to wash away all your sins. The soldiers of course have more than a few they wish to offload. This is a grim kind of horror, about the weight of sin and the costs of redemption. It’s creepy, tense and scary as hell, the kind of horror that seeps into your consciousness until the narrative evaporates and all you’re left with is raw emotion.

Journey Among Women (Beyond) is Lord of the Flies with 70’s feminist ideals set in Australia’s convict past. In the generous extras director Tom Cowan speaks of taking 12 half naked inner city girls, including members of ghetto lesbian feminist rock band ‘clitoris,’ out into the bush and roughing it for 6 weeks, “there was almost a mutiny,” he explains calmly. And you can see this reversion to savagery on screen. It’s loose, heavily improvised and posses a dangerous feel, as a band of female convicts escape their shackles and create a utopian existence in the bush free from the abuse of men. It’s not entirely successful as a convict film thanks to the urban qualities of some of the girls , yet as a provocative (read heavy nudity and lesbian activity) study of power and gender issues in 1977 it’s a fascinating, not in the least because it manages to avoid the sexploitation tag, despite brimming with all the right ingredients.

When the hitchhiker beheads his driver, sews it back on and then sends the confused victim on his way, you realise that The Committee (Dark Horse) is a very strange film. This surreal murder is used as a catalyst to explore ideas of freedom of choice and bureaucracy as a means of maintaining control. By having the victim up and walking, the focus moves away from the violence of the act to the arrogant motivations behind it. Written by a professor of economics and with an obscure unreleased Pink Floyd score, this is provoking English intellectual surrealism from 1968.

The Land That Time Forgot (Madman) is a boys own adventure story from the writer of Tarzan, with hyper cheesy special effects of dodgy looking plastic dinosaurs, pink smoke and ludicrous plot developments. Yes the crap plot is a dodgy special effect. Put simply, former foes are forced to band together when they are marooned on a mystical island trapped in the past. They then decide to shoot everything. It was made in 1975. You can tell.

Sex Galaxy (Arkles) is a green movie, created solely with recycled footage from z-grade science fiction from the 60’s and re voiced with the maturity of a horny 14 year old schoolboy. At one point Billy gets attacked by a vaginasaur. “Talk about being pussy whipped quips one astronaut,” “does anyone have any yeast?” screams another, “you were lucky Billy 10 seconds longer and you would have been a human pap smear.” That’s one of the more intelligent exchanges in this proudly puerile film about a planet filled with female sex slaves who are protected by a jive talking Forbidden Planet robot pimp. It’s stupid and rude. You’ll love it.

Bob Baker Fish

Mulatu Astatke – New York-Addis-London-The Story Of Ethio Jazz 1965-1975 (Strut)

Mulatu Astatke is the father of Ethio Jazz, in this writers opinion one of the most amazing living composers. His vibraphone, conga and various other percussion playing was a real highlight throughout Ethiopiques series, his unique fusion of jazz, funk, latin and African rhythms nothing short of inspired. He’s played with Duke Ellington, had his music in the Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers and earlier this year offered up a funky as hell collaboration with UK rare groove merchants the Helliocentrics.

Yet this compilation demonstrates why he is so revered. It opens with possibly his most famous piece, the ultra slinky Yekermo Sew, a cool jazzy beast with one of the longest melody lines this side of Ravel’s bolero. The tune is just so cool, so infectious seemingly without trying that his reputation would be secure on this track alone. Yet the album is brimming with inspired coolness. On the second piece I Faram Gami I Faram he takes a total left turn and comes out with a distinctively Cuban feel to his music, though on the third Emete the horns sound honky like some kind of lively noir juke joint, playing a loose mischievous sound that is brimming with possibilities. And that’s just the first three of twenty pieces, and they’re all amazing, with this loose ramshackle feel that does a disservice to him as it hides the complexity and compositional care.

It’s impossible to get an unbiased review from this writer about Mulatu Astatke. He is one of the masters, and this collection ably demonstrates why.

Fragmented Frequencies Nov 09

You know we need it, we got to have it, know we want it, got to have it, give it to me. What are we talking about? Soul Power! Say it loud. Soul Power! Not only is it the title of one of James Brown’s most incendiary slabs of pure take no prisoners red hot funk from 1971 (with the original JB’s) , it’s also the name of Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s new doco charting the 3 day music festival that accompanied 1974’s Rumble In The Jungle, Muhammad Ali pitted against George Forman for the world heavyweight championship in deepest darkest Zaire. Soul Power (Madman) is a fly on the wall of the festival from the logistical nightmare setting up, to the incredible performances. Brown with a super cool mustache was the star attraction ripping through Same Beat, Payback, Cold Sweat, Say it Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud). His performance is magnetic, frenzied, sexual “It was like a devil set,” offered Levy Hinte when I spoke with him earlier this year, “I really could have made a James Brown concert movie.”

Yet perhaps some of the most compelling moments of the film, which also includes Celia Cruz, a very young Sister Sledge, BB King, Bill Withers, Miriam Makkeba, OK Jazz, and Tabu Ley amongst others, occurs with the US performers on the streets of Zaire. Excited about returning to the motherland, they’d burst into these spontaneous jam sessions with the locals, creating beautiful unguarded moments of cultural connection where the musicians stop strutting and the camera feels like it disappears. “I wish I had more of it,” sighed Levy-Hinte, “that whole feeling you can see it on their faces. It was such a special experience for the musicians to go back to Africa, to the roots and really commune with people.” The problem however is lack of extras, this could have been a five disc set. It’s a great film, but also a wasted opportunity, three quarters of Brown’s performance is still on the cutting room floor.

It’s been described as the SXSW of world music, and there’s no denying the wealth of interesting music and possibilities on hand at the second annual Australasian World Music Expo. By day it’s a trade fair with panels, presentations and workshops, and by night it’s a series of showcases of artists from the UK, Australia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand Vanuatu, India, New Caledonia, Solomon Islands, you name it. Highlights include The South Seas Concert which features a bunch of PNG and West Papua string bands curated by David Bride, the UK’s Mad Professor doing live dub mixing on Melbourne’s The Red Eyes, and of course Mad Professor’s dub/ reggae workshop. Just spilling the beans on how he was able to work with Lee Scratch Perry would be enough for this writer. Fragmented Frequencies is also keen to check out The Chooky Dancers from Arnhem Land, who’s unique interpretation of Zorba the Greek made them internet stars -they’re helming the From Tradition to You-tube workshop. It’s mind blowing, it’s crazy it’s a veritable feast of world music and it’s on from the 19-22nd of Nov in and around the Arts Centre with many of the performances free, check www.awme.com.au for more details.

Finally after 22 years together Australia’s The Neck’s are back with Silverwater (Fish of Milk), a 67 minute piece that is essentially a series of musical movements. Though it’s still improvised, they’re a long way from their jazz roots, nowadays trading in these exotic sounding drones, electronic and rickety percussion material. It’s earthy and sounds somehow like world music, but it’s just difficult to determine which world. Firstly there’s the percussive bamboo sound of the Indonesian Anklung, then there’s Buck’s interpretative and peculiar use of his regular kit, then there’s these electronic glitches hidden amongst the percussion, and finally Buck’s strange calming repetitive guitar work. It’s minimal, quite experimental, often with one of the members silent for long periods of time. Yet it’s also quite beautiful, almost transcendent. The trio are creating whole new structures before our very ears, whole new framework for putting music together, new even for them. This album is multi layered, a textural delight and totally uncatagorizable. It’s genius.

Fragmented Films – From July 09

Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job! Season 2 (Adult Swim/ Madman) is so cheesy, so wrong and so damn surreal in it’s stupidity and wrongness that watching it you begin to question your own sanity. It’s like time stretches out, consumes you and when it spits you out you can no longer trust your senses. Yes that’s right it’s TV LSD. It’s outsider comedy, filled with freaks and weirdos doing weird freaky things that are absolutely nonsensical. But it’s genius nonsense. It’s the kind of work that David Lynch would be doing now if he went for Cheetos and Baconaise instead of transcendental meditation. They’re obsessed with dodgy videotape and crappy visual effects. It’s like public access TV set in a psychiatric hospital letting the inmates do what they want. Both John C Reilly (Magnolia) and Jeff Goldblum appear regularly, even Dave Navarro pops up – but he doesn’t appear to have been let in on the joke.

Bryan Singer’s (X-Men/ The Usual Suspects) little seen debut feature Public Access (Dark Horse/ DV1) is the bastard child of his oeuvre. It’s incredibly stylish, visually assured and the acting in particular is creepy and engaging. Yet there’s a NQR quality that makes it compelling. It’s so open ended, like they trashed half the script, not bothering to connect the logic or expand upon the motivations underlying the characters behaviors. In Hollywood land where everything is over explained as if we’re skittish 9 year olds with learning difficulties, this is refreshing. The key is the manipulations of the impossibly smooth Wiley, who enters a small town and immediately books time on the local cable station. His show stirs up underlying tensions and pits townsfolk against each other in this Blue Velvetesque descent into what lies behind the white picket fences.

Polyester (Reel) is John Waters doing John Waters doing Joseph Sirk, a knowingly hysterical melodramatic soap opera brimming with wrongness and stupidity. All the senses are heightened. Some shouldn’t be, like the screen gimmick Odourama, in which the audience was to scratch and sniff a card everytime the corresponding number appeared on screen. Unfortunately the card doesn’t appear with this DVD, so you can’t enjoy the aromas of fart or dog doodoo in your lounge-room. Waters, who had only recently graduated from making people eat dog feces on camera, supplies many putrid oddly chace moments of outlandish debauchery. He’s obsessed with 50’s suburbia and where Sirk attempted to mine the subversion beneath the perfect veneer, Waters puts the subversion front and centre. Life is terrible for modern transvestite housewife Divine. Her husband is rooting around with his mousy looking secretary, her possibly brain damaged daughter (she never stops dancing) has been knocked up by the local hoodlum, and her glue sniffing son’s foot fetish has him wanted by the police. No wonder she’s an alcoholic. However when she meets the chiseled Todd Tomorrow and embarks on a tempestuous affair things are looking up, yet you know in Waters hands it can’t be that simple. There’s a great directors commentary too.

All you need to do is look at the cover of the Machine Girl (Eastern Eye), to find out everything you need to know – a young hottie in a Sailor Moon outfit splattered with blood who’s left arm is a gattling gun. Replacing body parts with weapons is almost a genre to itself these days, what with Rose McGowan’s machine gun leg in Planet Terror, though the Japanese have been doing it best since Tetsuo. The Machine Girl is another in a long line of shamelessly over the top, impossibly gory, ultra violent and very funny films the Japanese have been churning out recently. We’ve got metal bras that double as drills, amputations, geysers of blood, a touch of necrophilia, and ninja yakuza’s, in what is ultimately a revenge flick, that’s totally outlandish, shocking and proudly gratuitous.

The Savage Innocents (Umbrella) features some of the greatest laughter you will ever see/ hear in a film. Of course laughter is sex in this 1959 foray into the world of the Eskimo from Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause). Whilst Anthony Quinn plays the lead character Inuk and the mix between location and studio footage is a little obvious, this film is a real gem, highlighting the culture clash between the encroaching West and the Eskimos in a sensitive, compelling and slightly kitsch manner.

Fragmented Films October 09

Larry Clark can be hit and miss, for every Kids or Ken Park you can get Another Day in Paradise. Yet over the years one thing has become increasingly clear. Despite his penchant for pervy shots of pre pubescent boys with their shirts off, he offers a gritty shocking kind of reality that is totally alien to Hollywood. Wassup Rockers (Accent) is a departure for Clark. There’s no drugs or explicit voyeuristic teen sex here, yet there is the kind of desperate street realism for which he has made his name. It follows a group of hispanic skaters from south central, longhaired punkers in tight jeans who fly in the face of the baggy gangster rap norm. In the directors commentary Clark speaks of finding the crew at an LA skate park then taking them to various other skate parks every saturday for the next year. Whilst there’s something concerning about a 66 year old hanging with 14 year old boys every weekend, the first half of the film, coming from their own tales possesses a realism that could never be achieved without some degree of mutual trust. These kids are playing themselves. Unfortunately the second half, where Clark takes some artistic license and re-imagines them as The Warriors meeting Paris Hilton all becomes a little too slapstick, too kitsch, feeling forced, overly cinematic and very very dubious. Yet we’re under no illusions with Clark. Even his flawed films are morally questionable enough to make them essential.

Blacklisted by Hollywood and outed as a member of the communist party, Jules Dassin subsequently relocated to Europe where he would go on to create Rififi, one of the greatest heist films ever. Yet in 1947 he was still in the US working with Burt Lancaster on the prison drama Brute Force (Directors Suite) which offers old chestnuts like stool pigeons, unbreakable but moral prisoners (Lancaster) and a sadistic warden who drives the good and noble prisoners to a suicidal escape attempt. Unfortunately though due to Oz what may have been shocking at the time now feels a little dated. Naked City (Directors Suite) is a thorough yet gripping 1948 police procedural drama. Step by step it demonstrates how to solve a crime, in the way Law and Order and CSI have since replicated. It was also one of the early films actually filmed in the streets of New York, mingling actors and real people, often filmed in a van behind a two way mirror. Night and City (Directors Suite) is one of Dassin’s great films, not in the least due to the casting of dapper sleaze-bag Richard Widmark. Filmed on the streets of 1950 London it’s a hard boiled tale of a fast talking shyster who’s shot at the big time could also be his undoing. This is what noir is all about, the spiral out of control. “Harry is an artist without art,” offers a corrupt club owner about Widmark’s slimy character and the images of Widmark frantically fleeing a London dawn will stay with you forever.

You can file Breakin (Shock) under ‘lame fad dance films,’ alongside your Dirty Dancing’s, your Lambada’s (it was forbidden for a reason), and your Fame’s. Its appeal now is that it’s dripping with kitsch youth culture cliches and features an early appearance from a groovy Jean Claude Van Damme and Ice-T. Then there’s the immortal Turbo dancing to Kraftwerk’s Tour de France which rates alongside the opening to a Touch of Evil as one of the greatest scenes cinema has to offer. Some films are meant to be forgotten, this is too much fun to allow that to happen.

Afro Samurai (Madman) was cool in a dumb hyper violent rivers of blood, spaghetti western meets insane Japanese manga kind’ve way. The melding of Eastern folklore and hip urban Afro American culture was as equally opportunistic as it was inspired. Its sequel Afro Samurai Resurrection (Madman) reeks of cash in, with Samuel L Jackson returning as the voice of Samurai, Lucy Lui and Mark Hamil as the bad guys and of course RZA (Wu Tang Clan) providing the ultra cool score. It’s easy to be seduced by style, bask in the geysers of blood and hip hop beats, yet, well there is no yet, the blood and violence is super cool, sexy as hell and a lot of fun to bask in.

Fragmented Frequencies Oct 09

If your curious about sound, about texture, about frequency, without the need for overtly musical elements like melody or percussion, in finding new ways to compose and construct sound, then Melbourne is the place for you this month.

Tomorrow the World is a mini experimental sound festival at the Westspace Gallery, that’s on currently and will continue until the 1st of November. Every day of the week you can trek down to Westspace to get your fill of curious and eclectic sound and media artists doing curious and eclectic things. Whether it’s a Philip Brophy or Adrian Martin slide night, improvisor Jim Denley or Norwegian guitarist Kim Myhr discussing their practice before demonstrating it via performance, or Marco Cher-Gibard and Rosalind Hall’s amazing audio visual sax/msp performances that need to be seen to be believed, you’ll get your fill of experimentation and innovation here. Hell it even ends on a boat going down the Maribrynong with sound artist Philip Samartzis who will use the boat and surrounds to create a site responsive sound performance. Perhaps most interesting is the focus on children for some of the events, with Eamon Sprod and Dale Gorfinkel taking an instrument building workshop, or a couple of weeks later Sprod and Rod Cooper taking the kids for a walk down the Maribrynong. This doesn’t sound like your usual monotonous chin scratching sound festival, where underfed students fiddle earnestly with laptops to conjure up terrifying and hurtful sounds that no one really wants to hear anyway. But you never know. Check www.westspace.org.au for the full program.

Western Australian Matt Roesner has released a couple of really interesting, quite minimal electronic albums that tread the boundary between sound and music on both Room40 and Apestaartje, though his latest is a 12-inch on UK label 12×50. He’s coming to Melbourne along with Perth shoe-gazers The Ghost of 29 Megacycles, a dreamy heavily reverbed Windy and Carl meets My Bloody Valentine three piece, who’s album Love Via Paper Planes (Sound and Fury) is due anytime. What’s more TGO29M guitarist Greg Taw will play live with Roesner, offering some drum textures and guitar drones alongside Roesner’s laptop and guitars. They’re playing Horse bizarre on the 22nd of Oct, the 23rd at Glitch Bar, and the Tote on the 24th all with different local supports.

Over the last decade or so Australian born French resident percussionist Will Guthrie has repeatedly demonstrated his ability to move between jazz, rock and quite musical realms into more experimental directions using contact microphones and junk to create these incredibly articulate musique concrete sound pieces. It’s pretty clear that the guy can play almost anything. Spike-S is a 7-inch on Norwegian label Pica Disk. And it’s mental, The first side is an all out assault of kick-ass pedal to the metal kit drumming. He pummels those bastards under a noisy drony mess of raw searing noise and it feels good. Meanwhile side b becomes much more tinkery and electro acoustic, focussing more on space, a kind’ve cut and paste reworking using elements of side A. It’s inspiring stuff. Check out www.picadisk.com for more details.

Keeping the French/ Australian relationship going French sound artist Cedric Peyronnet (Toy Bizarre) is releasing a 3-inch cd a month over a 12 month period, each with a new 12 minute piece composition. And crazily enough they’re all based on reports made to him by an Australian about a 1 metre square patch of the Atherton Gardens. So for example “Fog, drift, quiet, a lone red vine leaf floats…falls, flurry and plummet from the golden ash,” gets us an incredibly visceral almost glacial sound piece, with bird chirping behind a sharp metallic and quite thin oscillating drone. It’s incredible work. Each disc is limited to 50. Check www.k216.ingeos.org for more.

Finally Fragmented Frequencies can’t go past a Sabbatical night at the Empress, Glass, Drums and Piano. It’s Lucas Abela (evil glass blowing dude), Sean Baxter (Bucketrider) and Paul Grabowsky (Melbourne jazz alumni). It sounds absolutely wild and I have no idea what to expect. It’s on the 7th of November. Also performing are James Rushford and Joe Talia, a duo who earlier in the year released the curious electro acoustic music concrete Palisades (Sabbatical). Check http://www.myspace.com/sbbtcl for more details.

Bob Baker Fish

Flaming Lips – Embryonic (Warner)

From Soft Bulletin onwards they kept up the mantra that the more experimental their techniques the more pop their sounds, almost like they were throwing up their hands and apologising for falling into line. Yet the soundtrack to last years Christmas on Mars feature seems to have irrevocably altered the band and returned them to their haphazard playful and at times noisy roots. This album is a world away from the comfortable calculated (read boring) pop of Do You Realize. It’s a dark psychedlic trip. It’s experimental and atmospheric, but most of all it’s sprawling, self indulgent and uncontained, with the songs taking a back seat behind the band’s flights of sonic fancy. That’s not to say it’s not musical, it’s just that it’s a little bit mental and messed up in the inspired beautiful way that Flaming Lips used to do it, albeit with better production values. We’re talking 18 tracks here, 70 odd minutes and it tangents around madly in a way that steadfastedly refuses coherance. Initially it’s dense and overwhelming, the structures don’t makes sense, the sounds are weird, some distorted, others just plain wrong, yet after a while you give in to their world and it all starts to make a messed up kind of sense. MGMT appear, as does Karen O making sound effects on the endearing nursery rhyme I Can Be a Frog, but the breadth of this album just can’t be ignored. Gone is the trippy uplifting confetti, the dancing animal suits, the beach balls and in return we’re left with this dark psychedlic trauma, a weird slightly playful paranoia, and a feeling that the band is back and anything is possible.

This album is audacious. You can’t shake the notion that they didn’t have to do this, yet in their 26th year as a band they have crafted the most vital, exploratory and artistic vision of their career.

Bob Baker Fish