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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

When Iggy Pop was spitting and screeching about how he wanted to be your dog, all sleazy rock n’ roll cool, it’s very unlikely he was thinking of the morally questionable 1972 French (dubbed into English) yarn Liza: Love to Eternity (Madman). It’s a bizarre and kinky little work that proudly sets feminism back decades. Marcello Mastroianni (La Dolce Vita) lives a reclusive existence on a tropical island with only his dog for company, yet their solitude is shattered by the appearance of Catherine Deneuve, who kicked off her yacht is left to fend for herself. Gradually their dysfunctional relationship develops until Deneuve becomes jealous of the attention he devotes to the dog and conspires to take its place – literally. When he puts the collar on her and makes her fetch a stick the wrongness hits you like a slap to the face. He just slept with her, this is a film about bestiality.

In 1996 Todd Solondz’s (Happiness) Welcome to the Dollhouse (Beyond) was a revelation. It was mean, nasty, and just a little bit cute in a suburban John Waters gross-out kind’ve way. Following the torments of Dawn ‘Wienerdog’ Wiener, teased by her classmates, ignored by her family and hopeless at everything, we keep waiting for that one redeeming feature, because surely someone this ugly, this pathetic, this unlikable has one true talent. It’s when she’s alone with the studly ultra popular lead singer of her brother’s band and she offers to play the piano for him you realise that this is what the film has been leading up to. Nervously she seats herself, peers at the sheet music, and proceeds to murder the hell out of the tune. She’s got nothing. Wienerdog even dutifully meets the school bully as ordered to be ‘raped,’ of course the bully is just a schoolboy and has no idea what rape is, but even so…Solondz calls it a sad comedy about surviving growing up, yet like The Office it’s difficult to watch because it’s dripping with cringe.

French director Robert Bresson’s 1956 A Man Escaped (Directors suite) is the kind of artist statement that cinema was invented for. He used non actors and had them repeat their lines over and over until they were delivered devoid of meaning, liberating all the acting. It matches the austere minimalism of each frame, and only seems to elevate the experience. There are no extraneous elements here. Even the sound design is minimal and stylised, with much of the sound occurring off screen. The precision and control here is remarkable. There are links to Ponterverco’s Battle of Algiers, however it possesses what some have referred to as a transcendent quality that elevates this prison escape film to a meditation on fate and destiny. Lancelot Du Lac (Directors Suite) is a little less successful, the sound design a metaphor, almost entirely comprised of the pokey clinking of the armor of the Knights of the Round Table. Rather than focussing on their heroic exploits, Bresson peers beneath the facade, and concentrates instead on the splintering and petty squabbling within the egocentric knights.

George A Romero uses zombies to make political statements. Despite the sledgehammer subtlety of Dawn of The Dead (Umbrella), it’s difficult not to love him, because if you have to sit through socio political statements they may as well be coated in truckloads of blood and gore. As society is decimated by the zombies a few survivors locate a shopping mall and set themselves up, gorging on the food and living out their consumerist fantasies. Of course if you want to see a bunch of zombies lurching through a shopping centre all you need to do is visit Highpoint on a saturday morning, the difference being at least you get to see their heads splatter here. This is a three disc set, with the original film, an extended cut, and a version edited by Italian horror maestro Dario Argento (Suspiria). It’s brimming with extras, like Romero’s q&a session at last years MIFF, multiple commentaries, and two feature doco’s.

If you’ve been wondering whatever happened to Peter Greenaway the answer is simple, he’s continued to make increasingly boring and unwatchably pretentious films. Nightwatching (Beyond), looks gorgeous and has the guy from The Office playing Rembrandt, yet despite an interesting premise is marred by too many theatrical (read incomprehensible) monologues.

It’s probably around the time of the earnest chugging groove of Sala, track 36 of Japanese lunatic Dokaka’s 88 track debut album Human Interface (Dual Plover), that the first seeds that you may be losing touch with reality really begin to take hold. It’s not necessariy its musicality, or it’s R&B groove, something it shares with the one minute nineteen Verb four tracks on, it’s that they’re surrounded by some of the most curious and schitzo attempts at music that you’ve ever heard. This is sheer lunacy, the kind of crazy obsessive outsider genius that is all too rare. The music is fine, a myriad of genres, quite experimental, carefully structured, short sharp and punchy, with most tracks clocking in at just over a minute. There’s a cartoony feel to Dokka’s blend of rock, pop, r&b, torch ballads and bad 80’s memories. But that may because he’s created this whole damn thing with his voice. He’s famous for his vocal only reinterpretations of Led Zeppelin, Slayer, and the Rolling Stones, though Bjork also enlisted his services for her own experiments with vocal music on her 2004 Medúlla album. Human Interface is his debut solo release and whilst sharing a similar manic weirdness with Mike Patton’s Adult Themes for voice (Tzadik), he also delves into highly musical areas that are nothing short of jaw dropping. Perhaps this is the evolution of beatboxing, a one man barbers shop quartet attacked by a rubber lipped banshee. Once you normalise this kind of lunacy you’re in trouble.

Speaking of outsider music PIVIXKI (Sabbatical) is a collaboration between local pianist/ composer Anthony Pateras and Agents of Abhorrence drummer Max Kohane. They sound exactly like the Necks would if they decided to kill their bass player, get tatts and listen to grindcore. Except the piano, which takes on an abstract flowery new music feel – except when Pateras pounds the bejesus out of it like all he owns are thumbs. Like all Sabatical releases (www.sbbtcl.com) it’s limited to 200 and is fascinating and frenetic, the duo fusing together effortlessly, constantly moving, not afraid to startle and get a little musical alongside their beds of atonal discordance.

Speaking of discordance Italian Dario Buccino has an incredibly strange new DVD/CD Corpo Nostro (Extreme). In the doco he speaks of wanting to create “hypnotic excitement and numbness,” two states of being that he views integral in altering consciousness. His music is created by beating large thin sheets of steel, the kind they used back in the radio days to create thunder, and he attacks it with an almost religious zeal. The DVD also contains a busking session where he encourages volunteers to have a crack themselves, and excerpts from some live performances, demonstrating his virtuostic range on this peculiar instrument. “It’s very odd how he disregards harmony,” comments an excited percussionist, as we go behind the scenes to view how this extraordinary work was put together. www.xtr.com.

New Weird Australia is a free download only compilation of some of the more interesting Australian music around. Many of these folks you haven’t heard before, though Panoptique Electrical who offered up his second album, Yes To Fear Yes To Desire (Sensory Projects) recently offers an unrelesed track and there are some really curious tunes by Kharkov, Broken Chip and Sam Price. My favorite is from the suggestively titled Cock Safari. When I got on their myspace I found a link to a band called Anal Cum Wolf. When I got on their myspace I found a link to Nigger Fart Dance Party USA. When I got on their myspace they had a picture of a David Hasselhoff record called Night Rocker, where he is dressed in leather rocking out on the bonnet of KIT. They also had a song called Farting Like a White Man which sends race relations back 50 years. Then my head exploded. www.newweirdaustralia.com. There’s a new one each month.

Oh and yes. Don’t fret. Lightning Bolt. Here soon.

Coat yourself in baby oil and throw your keys into the bowl because we’re knee deep in soft-core porno chic heaven with the 1974 French adult sensation Emmanuelle (Madman). It’s a film that brought soft-core exploitation cinema to the mainstream thanks to it’s incredibly high production values and attractive cast. It established all the cliches, with an exotic locale simmering with sexual tension (Thailand), and a young innocent newly married woman beginning a tempestuous voyage of sexual discovery when she joins her highly sexed totally sleazy diplomat husband. It’s dripping with gloss, clearly the filmmakers figuring (correctly) that if they amp up the production values then no one would mind so much that the whole film is just a pretentious excuse to get Sylvia Kristel to nude up and be dry humped by everything that moves. Actually that’s not altogether true, her husband dresses her provocatively and sends her out with a sinister old pervert who educates her by taking her to an opium den and watching while she’s raped. Nothing like a spot of deflowering to get the juices flowing. Yet that’s only the beginning in a questionably erotic film from Just Jaeckin (The Story of O), with music from Francis Lai (The Godfather).

By the time the second film comes around, imaginatively titled Emmanuelle 2 (Madman), the tables have turned for our heroine. She’s been transformed into a sexual predator, preying on animal, mineral and vegetable, grooming innocent young virgins for her marital bed and wrapping her legs around anything with a pulse. Set in Hong Kong, the couple have surrounded themselves with a bunch of sleazy ex pat swingers, where life is just one big never ending key party. The production values here may actually be better than the first, and there are some genuinely erotic moments such as a bit of three-way rub and tug action in a Bali bathhouse, but perhaps to compensate even the slightest whiff of narrative is thrown out with the bath-water and we’re just left with an increasingly tiring bunch of lushly shot scenes of nude people rubbing, licking and unconvincingly pretending to hump each other.

By our third adventure, Emmanuelle 3 (Madman) the cracks are showing. Firstly Emmanuelle has cut her hair and looks a little like a stern primary school teacher, then her love interest, the studly film director Gregory looks leathery like Roy Scheider and acts with the vitality of Keanu Reeves on heavy sedation. This time our oily couple are in Seychelles and Emmanuelle is tiring of the debauchery. The free love psycho babble of the previous films is increasingly sounding like convenient rationalisations for her husband’s attempts to get his end into the help, and even the climaxes are becoming increasingly hollow. Whilst the first film was about Emmanuelle’s physical awakening, this film is about her emotional development, realising that in her pursuit of pleasure she’s actually forgoing the one thing she truly wants. With a Serge Gainsbourg soundtrack, this is actually the best in the series, a real critique on the supposedly super cool liberated lifestyle celebrated in the first two.

Emmanuelle 4 (Madman) is a travesty, shot in the 80’s, six years after the third it’s barely related to the previous three and impossible to watch. The plot revolves around Emmanuelle, now referred to by the actors name, Sylvia, who escaping a stalker ex lover travels to Brazil to get some plastic surgery. Under the knife she goes back to a 20 year old and played by a different actress proceeds to root everyone she stumbles across, including the seedy bloke she was running from. This may possibly be the worst film Fragmented Films has ever submitted to. Within the first five minutes three characters have voice overs, then there’s this ultra kitsch screen wipe that’s an animated zip that gets pulled down the screen, inexplicably transporting us into into a studio set where the old Emmanuelle does these curious psycho sexual things to people, totally unrelated to the plot. It makes Ed Wood seem like Fellini.

After four paragraphs of beating around the bush (so to speak), lets cut to the chase. Eraserhead (Umbrella) is the greatest film ever made by anyone anywhere ever at any time. David Lynch created a new form of cinematic language with this strange malformed baby, a lush wondrous fever dream with some of the most incredible sound design you will ever experience. This is a digitally re-mastered special edition with an hilarious 90 minute making of documentary which is simply Lynch reminiscing and tangenting off about the strange band of outsiders who labored on this baby for five years. We’ve never had such insight into how this magical beast was created – it’s the holy grail.