Fragmented Frequencies Aug 09

US group Dengue Fever were a total assault on the senses at this years Womadelaide. Firstly it’s their revival and celebration of 60’s and 70’s Cambodian psychedelic rock, then it’s the way they look. They’re like the X-Men of music, each member is a super hero with special powers.

At the time Fragmented Frequencies wrote: “They’re the ultimate eye candy. I defy you to tear your eyes from the gorgeous five foot nothing lead singer Chhom Nimol, squeezed into a tight pink skirt who obtained these impossibly high pitches with her vocals. The guitarist looked like ZZ Top’s early years, the bass player is a giant, the sax player and the drummer both just stole the booze from a Tom Waits session and the keyboardist looks like a down on his luck pawn shop dealer. They’re a cartoon, with kitsch choreographed stage moves and it all seems like a gimmick, except their music, psychedelic Cambodian pop from the 60’s was incredible, They drew upon their last album Venus on Earth (Real World/Planet Company) and in particular their trans global duet Tiger Phone Card went down a treat. It was Kenny and Dolly for the cool kids, though you couldn’t help feeling a little uncomfortable after noticing a raincoat brigade congregating in front of Chhom.”

Sleepwalking Through The Meekong (M80/ Planet Company) is a film that peels beneath the veneer, that adds a few additional dimensions to the band. Part travelogue, part rock bio, it documents their tour to Cambodia in 2005. For Nimol, who was already apparently a successful karaoke singer before moving to the US, it’s a homecoming and for the others you can sense the tension as they’re not quite sure what the Cambodians will make of Americans plundering their heritage. Through interviews with all members, gigs in sleazy dives, visits to music schools and a large open air festival you see music used as a form of cultural exchange. The Cambodian’s are amused and seem genuinely touched by these crazy Americans. And then you understand why. The music is in danger of being forgotten, as it comes from an era that was totally extinguished in the Killing Fields of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime, where one and a half million people, mostly professionals, musicians and artists were slaughtered, and music (aside from state sponsored) was outlawed. There are some harrowing tales here and the music comes across as a way of healing some of these wounds. Dengue Fever jam with a bunch of kids learning traditional music, also Cambodian traditional and pop musicians and the film and the accompanying soundtrack are amazing affirming documents The great thing is that much of Dengue Fever’s repatoire is these old songs that everyone knows, so it’s pretty easy to get a singalong. Sleepwalking Through The Meekong features the film with a bunch of special features, also the soundtrack which blends field recordings, street musicians with Dengue Fever, with a particularly impressive version of Ethiopian legend Mulatu Astatke’s Ethanopium.

It’s album number 4 for Malian seven piece Tinariwen (Shock), and on Imidiwan Companion we’re seeing a refinement of their unique and beautiful sound. Such is this incredible Toureg ensemble’s popularity that they’ve played with everyone from the Rolling Stones to Tuung in the last few years, even landing in Melbourne earlier this year, seducing audiences with their hypnotic webs of guitar, hand drums and evocative call and response vocals. If you want desert rock, if you want to know where the blues came from, it’s all right here. It feels incredibly immediate, once the repetative riffing begins all you can see are sweeping vistas of sand. Whilst the earthy groove underlies all their tunes, ocassionally here they strip it right back to bass and percussion, amping up the funk, playing a little more with dynamics. They also do this gentle stripped back fireside groove, that when the group vocals comes in the hair stands up on the back of your neck. There seems to be a little more spoken word here than previously, kind’ve gruff and throaty, but really if you’re a fan of any of their previous releases you’re not going to be disappointed here.

Fragmented Films 28th June 09

In You The Living (Directors Suite), with its sparse washed out palette, and quirky ambiguous characters, Swedish writer/ director Roy Andersson finds those peculiar little uncomfortable moments in life and mines them for all their dark hilarious absurdity. It’s totally deadpan, kind’ve Jacques Tati without the slapstick or Samuel Becket without the wordplays. There’s a darkness to his comedy that at times ventures perilously close to an unbearable kind of hopelessness. He’s made 4 films in 37 years and You The Living is quite simply remarkable. He’s set it up as fifty scenes, sketches if you like. Some, such as the elderly man with a walker obliviously dragging his dog along by the neck are hilarious, others are poignant or downright miserable, such as the man morosely listing how his investments have failed, causing him to have to remain at work longer, all the while being straddled by a naked moaning and writhing woman.

Tokyo Gore Police (Eastern Eye) is the kind of hysterical heightened Freudian wrongness that the Japanese do best. Borrowing shamelessly from Blade Runner, Testsuo and early Cronenburg, the mutations are over the top, highly sexual and very very funny. The entire film is drenched in gore, with spurting geysers of blood, vaginas that turn into the snapping jaws of a crocodile, and mammoth membrane penises that that shoot I’m not sure what. Capping it off is the head mutant hunter, the impossibly sexy Eihi Shiina who first seduced us with her quiet innocence in Audition (Siren) and then went on to absolutely terrify us with her sadistic torture devices. Here she ruthlessly hunts and mercilessly slaughters the mutants in a futuristic ultra violent and totally ludicrous Japan. She’s is way too classy for this – and that just makes it better.

Yet there’s also a very surreal side to Japan, best exemplified by Big Man Japan (Eastern Eye), which manages to seamlessly merge Japan’s obsession with giant monsters attacking their cities, reality TV, and the absurd direct to camera mockumentary schtick of having a film crew in toe, like The Office or Man Bites Dog. The crew follows a regular loser, a dole bludging schmo, boring us with the meaningless details of his life, until we discover that he, with the assistance of a large dose of electricity transforms into a skyscraper size super hero who battles monsters. Of course he’s lazy and a coward so mostly he waits till they turn their back and dongs them on their head. These may be the only monsters you’ll ever see with comb-overs, that smell like 500 people emptying their bowels or who’s weapon is a mammoth extendable penis with an eyeball on the end. It’s truly bizarre and wrong.

The first lesson for would be filmmakers is if you’re so desperate to have a junkie in your film, maybe you should go out and meet a few. Just cruise out of Fitzroy or Carlton or wherever you creative types live and head off to Dandenong, or Lilydale. What you’ll find is that your junkies aren’t your attractive voluptuous healthy looking things with perfect teeth. They are walking skeletons, with bad skin and a not so quiet desperation who use junk to dull the pain of life. Yet healthy TV junkies aren’t all that is wrong with No Through Road (Accent Underground), which begins as Straw Dogs and ends with as much sadistic bloodletting as Tokyo Gore Police. At some point it switches gears, possibly about the time the corpse of his father’s best friend starts inexplicably talking to him and it’s all downhill from there. It’s a peculiar film with a great beginning as our main character’s well ordered solitude is disturbed when he finds an intruder in his closet. Yet it loses track, it sets up the suspense well, yet as a result the later sadistic violence feels both gratuitous and cheap, like it’s an easy out.

Finally Beastie Boy Adam Yauch’s Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot (Aztec) provides a pumping hip hop beat to the best and the brightest High School basketballers gathered together at the infamous outdoor Rucker Park in Harlem. Using this Elite 24 game as a frame, Yauch explores these young players lives, their family, friends and reputations. They’re like lambs to the slaughter, kids who have mortgaged their adolescence, living under the pressures of becoming ‘next big thing,’ before they’ve even made it to college. It’s fascinating and a little bit frightening, and this contextual information really adds to the tension of the game as you root for the down to earth ones without dominating parents or show biz attitudes, who you hope are less likely to become cocaine addicted pack rapists.

Fragmented Frequencies 25th June 09

So it’s that time again, where the hyper music nerds stroke their collective chins, close their eyes and celebrate with their ears, tuning into the world of sound art and experimental sonic practices. It’s Liquid Architecture’s 10th anniversary, a festival that has collected some of the most interesting, obscure and risk taking sound artists together over the last decade. This year they’ve managed to land Asmus Tietchens, a German composer who began with tape manipulation in the 60’s though took on an industrial electronic bent thereafter. Fragmented Frequencies first and only contact with him came courtesy of the very peculiar ∂ – Menge album in the mid 90’s on Ritornell (Mille Plateaux). It was a sweet electronic concreté work with no real sense of structure, sound that felt like it was already sitting there, electronically bubbling and spluttering away and Tietchens just happened along and recorded it. Obscurely knowing one of the artists is kind’ve like a badge of honour for Liquid Architecture, though often it’s the freaks you’ve never heard of who tear your face off and explode your mind. They’ve also got Swiss based electronic improvising artist Jason Khan, US mash up pioneers The Evolution Control Committee, German soundtrack artist Thomas Koner and a bunch of Australia’s best, brightest and weirdest intense sound dudes. It’s on from the 9th to the 12th of July and includes exhibitions, performances and workshops at various venues around Melbourne. Check http://www.liquidarchitecture.org.au for more details.

The Purple Duck is one of those evil wrong dudes from Suicidal Rap Orgy, so he’s quite at home on Australia’s wrongest record label Dual Plover. His debut solo album Duckside of the Moon (geddit?) is fucking stupid and amazingly great for exactly the same reasons. It feels like a comedy album, with skits such as Cunt Dracula, who is a nasty insensitive piece of work (even for a vampire) and Sex Falcon which is about a falcon that terrifies townsfolk by penetrating them and then dropping them off a mountain two hours away. Yes we know it’s juvenile but it doesn’t stop it being funny. And it’s part of the charm of Purple Duck who uses hip hop, funk, house, indie folk, blues and electro pop, torturing them within an inch of their life and then relieving them of urine. He’s launching his opus of wrongness with fellow eccentric hip hop dudes Curse Ov Dialect, The Professional Savage, Pig+Machine, and Aoi at Bar 303 in Northcote on Saturday the 11th of July.

Fragmented Frequencies desperately misses Leeds quintet Hood like Tracey Grimshaw misses credibility. A couple of years back the Adams brothers splintered off into two solo projects, Chris formed Bracken and his brother Richard developed Declining Winter, which not surprisingly if you play together at the same time sound exactly like Hood. Declining Winter’s Goodbye Minnesota (Sensory Projects) was an understated gem, a subtle and nuanced work that tapped directly into the emotions. A download only remix album has just been released featuring the likes of The Remote Viewer and Bracken tinkering at its bones. These remixes add elements of restrained electronica to the beguiling stillness, a kind of stripped surreal lilt to the work, with El Fog’s and Part Timer’s mix taking the tunes to a whole new level. Check http://sensoryprojects.com.au/

Finally many people will tell you that Miles Davis and the 80’s are a bad mix, that he had descended into a sad kitsch parody of the forward thinking greatness that he once effortlessly exuded. That said his last album, which he never lived to hear, the jazz fusion hip hop of 1992’s Doo Bop (Warner) is a firm favourite of Fragmented Frequencies. The DVD of a German concert in 1997 however is another matter. On Miles Davis: That’s what happened (Eagle Vision), his trumpet is a dull strained whisper and the tunes are hijacked by an awful polished jazz fusion band with bullshit guitar solos. Davis barely plays, his back to the camera, wandering around preoccupied, perhaps futilely looking for his sound. You know you’re in trouble when the highlight is his version of Cindy Lauper’s Time After Time. There’s also a short featurette on Miles’ art. “I love women with carriage,” he offers to a confused German journalist. It’s the best moment on this disc.

Bob Baker Fish

Fragmented Films 12th June 09

When the American crime series the Wire (HBO) hit the small screen in 2002 it was television year zero. Suddenly the bullshit morality didn’t cut it anymore, ditto to models pretending to be super cops, or earnest life affirming resolutions that clock in at the end of every 50 minutes. It was all about ‘the game,’ an uncompromising and realistic portrayal of people trapped in hopeless claustrophobic worlds, lazy cops who hate their jobs, corner dealers who don’t expect to live beyond their teens, politicians fattening their pockets. There was a grim understanding that the system was broke, yet also that it is what it is. It unveiled people just like us, flawed, stupid, lazy, but also sometimes passionate and driven.

The Spiral (SBS/ Madman) is a post Wire crime series set in the seedy world of the French legal system. It’s a place of competing agendas, where career advancement, an uncompromising hunger for money, drug addiction and petty grievances are just some of the barriers to justice. It’s quite seedy, and a little vicarious, the first season starts with a women dumped at the docks with her face destroyed beyond recognition, the second with a corpse incinerated in a car boot. It delights in the slow reveal, as each investigation takes eight episodes to reach its conclusion, seemingly implicating everyone it touches in some way, hence the title. It spares few, even those most committed to upholding the law, like the idealistic hunky young prosecutor at the centre of the series, or the hard yet sexy police detective who both quickly become tainted and complicit. And then they root. It’s a constant test for all, your morality vs your chances of career advancement, to eat or be able to sleep at night. It’s compelling precisely because the characters are so compelling. In the end the crimes almost become irrelevant as you wonder who’s going to come out unscathed.

Orson Welles relationship with film is a love affair through the ages. You have the boyish precocious bravado of Citizen Kane where he is innocent yet cocky, just happy enough to get a leg over and smart enough not to blow the opportunity. Then there’s the bold slightly perverted the Trial where he’s discovered how to make film hot and already initiated a few tentative sex games. Then there’s the masterwork, A Touch of Evil, the experienced lover who could effortlessly make film purr under his fingertips. F is Fake (Directors Suite) is from of a man tired of monogamy. Made in 1975 it turns structure and genre on its head and is a bold confusing artistic montage of disparate footage woven together to create a quasi documentary tale pondering the worlds of fakes and impostors, all the while slyly tangenting away and cheekily manipulating the viewer with lies and red herrings. Perhaps more remarkable though is the fish that got away, a documentary profiling Orson’s latter unfinished work, with tantalizing clips featuring some of the most amazing editing you will ever see.

Short films are generally about as pleasurable as running your genitals along a cheese grater smeared with chilies. This is because they’re all too often calling cards for directors desperate to prove how clever they are, or are made by film students who’s only interaction with the world has been through cinema (yes Quentin I’m talking to you). Yet not always. Wasp, a story of a single mother in a UK public housing estate is incredible. It’s raw yet gripping with an overwhelming sense of dread, yet also a compassion for its characters that draws you into their world. Director Andrea Arnold won an Oscar for this in 2005 and she uses the short form like few have before her. It’s on Cinema 16: World Short Films (Warp/ Inertia), a 2 disc set with some early obscure films from directors like Guillermo Del Toro, yet also more recent work from Guy Maddin and three of the best short films Fragmented Films has ever seen from people he’d never heard of. Chacun Son Cinema (Directors Suite) gives 33 established feature directors 3 minutes to celebrate what cinema means to them. Lynch, Cronenburg, Egoyan, Ken Loach, Jane Campion, Van Sant, Von Trier, Polanski, Wong Kar Wai, Wim Wenders all self indulgently masturbate onto the celluloid, shooting fetish shots of their favorite cinemas. It’s left to the incredible Dardenne brothers and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu (Babel) redeem things with comprehensible narrative, and of course Lars Von Trier is typically juvenile and provocative. Thank god.

Fragmented Frequencies 31st of May 09

Scott Hicks has a fetish for eccentric and obsessive classical pianists. If fictionalising the life of David Helfgott wasn’t enough, the award winning Shine director recently spent two years stalking minimalist legend Philip Glass. The resulting film, Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (Madman) has just been released on DVD. (Note the sly reference to his seminal four hour work ‘Music in Twelve Parts.’ I suppose we should just be glad it wasn’t titled something like ‘Through the Looking Glass’ or ‘Those in Glass Houses…’). Glass is equal parts renowned, revered and loathed for his endlessly swirling highly repetitive scores in theatre, opera and film including the ultimate stoner film Koyaanisqatsi and the Errol Morris’ crime doco Thin Blue Line (here Morris drops the nugget that Glass does ‘existential dread better than anyone else’). Hicks presents Glass as equal parts a laid-back family man, an obsessively driven workaholic composer and an intelligent enquiring soul with a yen for the spiritual. The level of intimacy here is astounding, apparently for most of the film it was just Hick’s and a sound recordist blending in with the furniture, and it doesn’t ever feel like Glass or his family are putting up a facade. In fact the film manages to capture one deeply intimate and quite personal event in Glass’ life, which when Hick’s zooms in vulture like feels quite intrusive.

Yet let’s not forget the music. We literally sit next to Glass as he writes his scores, attends rehearsals, and drops in to discuss his film music with Woody Allen. We even attend a solo piano performance in Melbourne. “For me writing is listening to music,” he offers from his getaway cabin in Nova Scotia, I don’t think of it, it’s already there.” As a way of analogy he speaks of a country field in the morning. At first it’s thick with fog and you can’t see anything, then in time you see a vague outline of a tree, then perhaps after more time passes a building and maybe in time the fog will clear and you will see everything. “I hear something,” he says a little earlier, “something very little, and I’ve trained myself to follow the sound of it.” Perhaps most unexpected is that music theory matters little to him, as its engaging a different part of his brain, the thinking part, and that just gets in the way. “I’ve become content to see music as a mystery,” he offers with the kind of contentment that you can only achieve via rigorous at times potentially life threatening sessions with his Buddhist and American Indian teachers. “Tell me about the time he buried you,” instructs Hicks. “I don’t like to talk about that,” comes the stern reply.

With interviews with everyone from Martin Scorcese to Laurie Anderson, as well a second disc of extras with full performances of Einstein on the Beach and the Kronos Quartet playing Dracula amongst others, it’s a unique insight into the life of a heavily revered working artist. And as a portrait of Glass perhaps it might change, or at the very least challenge some of our assumptions about the man and his music.

Sabbatical Records is a local label releasing dark experimental music in limited (200 hand numbered copies) runs. Many of their 13 odd releases up to this point have tapped into the dark dangerous electroacoustic world utilisng experimental and often improvised techniques.
The music is often quite extreme such as Absoluten Calfeutrail & Blarke Bayer’s Resolution Seminar, a sort of noise self help blast from artists better known in their day jobs in Whitehorse and My Disco. Yet the label also features some delicately nuanced drone work that becomes quite hallucinatory from Green Beret, a trio of Justin Fuller, Arek Gulbenkoglu and Henry Krips. In fact the entire label is comprised of some of the more interesting risk taking artists in the Melbourne experimental scene, often playing in new or unfamiliar contexts. They’ve just released Joe Talia and James Rushford’s duo Palisades and are looking forward to PIVXKI an Anthony Pateras Max Kohanne collaboration in the next couple of months. Check www.sbbtcl.com for more details.

And if you’re looking out for some Pateras action (and rounding off our discussion on eccentric obsessive pianists) he’ll be premiering a couple of new pieces under the banner of Percussion Portrait at the Melbourne Recital Centre on the 13th and 14th of June. Check http://www.anthonypateras.com for more details.

Fragmented Films 6th of May 2009

When you no longer exist and become trapped within your own misguided bloated and mythical image it can become a torturous chicken and egg scenario. The irony being you have no one else to blame but yourself. This was the quintessential problem for Gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson, author of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, who not only inserted himself into his stories, but made himself increasingly the focal point, more often than not to the detriment of the story itself, yet in doing so, somehow stumbled into a wider social milieu, into the darkness and hypocrisy at the heart of the American dream. Gonzo (Arthouse/ Madman) is an exhaustive document of the life, writing, celebrity and eccentricity of Thompson that is willing to delve beneath the mescaline, bourbon, and drug addled paranoia and explore the complexity of the man via archival footage, interviews with friends, family and even politicians on the receiving end of Thompson’s wit. And strangely enough it doesn’t forget the writing, with Johnny Depp reading excerpts over iconic 60’s music and imagery. Director Alex Gibney who won an Oscar for Taxi to the Darkside, tracks some of the most obscure footage of Hunter you could ever imagine, and he is exhaustive in his research, not pulling any punches when the ego and addictions seemed to sap his creative energy and his writing became a sad parody of his former genius. The directors commentary is like a whole new film with Gibney offering up numerous nuggets he uncovered during his research. Gonzo is the kind of film Hunter in all his complex contradictory madness deserves, simultaneously hilarious and tragic.

The Harder They Come (Umbrella) is so cool that it hurts, with great reggae music and copious amounts of ganja. Released in 1972 it’s the film that brought not only the sound of Jamaican reggae to the world, but also its fashion sense and lifestyle. Curiously it’s also a gangster film, a musical and a social commentary. It’s rough and raw, imbued not just with an urban street energy, but these incredible tunes from star Jimmy Cliff who sings the catchy title song and plays the rebellious lead role, yet also from Toots and the Maytals and Desmond Decker. This film is a real time capsule, owing a little to US blacksploitation combined with a cultural snapshot, playing as a anti social gangster film. There’s also some great extras including a 52 minute making off and interviews with all relevant parties.

Fix (Accent) is what happens when the MTV culture smokes ice and gets ADHD. Forget about bothering with numerous setups and angles, just give one of the actors the camera and set him lose. It’s subjective first person narrative, something Fragmented Films hasn’t seen since the 1947 detective noir The Lady In The Lake. In our cinema verite obsessed word, in our quest for immediacy and being right in the thick of the action (albeit deep in the confines of our comfortable armchair) Fix makes perfect sense. It runs with a couple of 20 somethings racing to get their charismatic and eccentric heroin addicted brother to rehab by 8pm or he will face 3 years jail. It’s high energy stuff with abrupt jump cuts and numerous seemingly insurmountable obstacles. It’s the huge boulder that unfortunately doesn’t crush Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark, picking up speed threatening to wipe out everything else in its path. Yet when they occasionally slow down there’s an unexpected depth, humor and social commentary lurking beneath the provocative style, and that’s ultimately what makes Fix such a taut and compelling experience.

There is nothing like Film Noir. It’s a morose and seedy post WW2 cynicism about human nature that expressed itself via dark expressionistic lighting, grim storylines and duplicitous archetypal characters. It exists in a time (the 1940’s and 50’s) when happy endings seemed inconceivable even to Hollywood. Otto Preminger is the autocratic (read violent bully) German director who created some of the most influential noir’s of the time and Madman have released three of these, Whirlpool, Fallen Angel and Where the Sidewalk Ends. We’re talking dirty cops, fraudulent hypnotists, seedy con-men, with the dice well and truly loaded against our anti heroes. In the Fallen Angel commentary academic Adrian Martin suggests there’s only one rule with Preminger, ‘follow the camera.” A master of long takes, he would move in and withdraw, obtaining a long shot and close up all within the one shot without cutting. It’s like being entertained whilst going to film school. He was a true maverick, actively attempting to subvert the puritan censors at every opportunity and crafting these incisive dark vignettes that could never be made today.

Fragmented Frequencies 30th April 09

 

 

 

 

 

Was God an astronaut? Did she visit ancient tribes throughout history? And how did whoever built the pyramids get so damn good at maths? These are the tough questions posed by the cheesy 1971 pseudo scientific documentary Chariots of the Gods (Beyond Entertainment). And the answers are a hoot. It comes from the wildly popular books produced by Erich Von Dankien, a bunch of questionably researched highly entertaining conspiracy pulp novels, that pose as rigorous scientific investigations and come across like the Cellestine Prophecy meets Da Vinci Code in flares. An earnest voice taps into ancient tribalism and rituals, reads centuries old poems and uses very curious interpretations of the dead sea scrolls and the bible to draw weight to the argument that we’re descended from aliens. Visually it’s stunning, you see 60’s Bagdad, Istanbul, India, Africa, South America, Egypt, visit the pyramids, Easter Island, even Aboriginal cave paintings in Australia in a magical mystical tour of the world.

 

Yet the real treat is the soundtrack which has become a highly sought after cult item, because it’s just so damn wacky. It’s an inspired mix of avant acid exotica, bachelor pad free-jazz, earnest cheesy synth, and soulless white-boy funk with messed up experimental sound effects simultaneously undermining and overwhelming the film. Excess was what these guys put on their breakfast cereal in the morning. Whilst Fragmented Frequencies likes to believe that the soundtrack was descended from aliens, It’s actually the work of the Peter Thomas Orchestra, a man who’s previous TV soundtracks for German Sci Fi and Spy shows had him referred to as as a wilder more eclectic John Barry, thanks to his sensational use of go go music alongside the ubiquitous noiresque brooding horns. He’s also known as one of Germany’s electro lounge pioneers, but really he was jack of all trades, equally adept at moving between classical, pop, rock and easy listening. His various orchestras and recording ensembles  apparently also featured session musos Jan Hammer (Miami Vice theme), Silvester Levey (Silver Connection), even Donna Summer. There is a rumour that Giorgio Moroder was also in the mix somewhere as well but Fragmented Frequencies believes that would be too good to be true. Perhaps the best thing about this soundtrack is that a fair amount of people who owned it are now dead. So you can pick it up on vinyl pretty easily at your local op shop. Perhaps it’s even cursed.

 

ACMI’s Synaesthesia series continues with the Queensland based audio visual electro acoustic duo Abject Leader. Their expanded cinema is based on the handmade, on hand processed 16mm film, on feedback systems, music concrete and avant garde cinema. They’re playing at ACMI on Thursday night and it should be a unique and quite hallucinatory experience. Best of all it’s free. One half of the duo, Joel Stern’s recent solo album Objects, Masks, Props (Naturestrip) is one of the more interesting and accomplished works of sound art you will hear. Recorded between 2001 and 2008 with raw material gathered from Ethiopia to Toowoomba it features field recordings of everything from bees within a bee hive to angry sounding dogs and insistent rain, yet there are also these thin wisps of melody that peek through occasionally and are quite beguiling. Despite the length of time in the creation it doesn’t feel composed, the feverish layers of sound slowly twisting and contorting in and out of earshot evoking an exotic fourth world sonic experience. The depth of his layering is astounding, taking you right inside a world that has never existed, yet so too is his editing which in the main is invisible, like he is attempting to craft an experiential sonic world for the listener, his edits replicating the subtle movement of the head in order to change sonic perspective. It’s a unique experience and it will be curious to hear if he utilises any of these techniques tomorrow night.      

 

Fragmented Films 9th April 09

Just so we’re clear that Import Export (Accent) is an art film, it contextualises its shocking and gratuitous moments, then acts all innocent and pretends not to enjoy them, leaving us to do its dirty work and cast judgement. Yet it still goes much further than it needs to, such as when the young Austrian drop-kick walks in on his sleazy stepfather having what he refers to as an ‘anatomy lesson,’ bending over a Ukrainian prostitute and telling her to stick her fingers in her ass – and that’s only the beginning of a scene that gets much much worse. There’s a matter of factness to the way it’s all filmed, like it’s simply a collection of events that just happened to be captured on film. It’s a grim exploration into poverty and morality from Ulrich Seidl (Dog Days), delving into those uncomfortable prejudices that we’d prefer not to think about. It’s a tale of two journeys, a young Ukrainian woman leaves her child and a career in nursing and internet porn behind for the promise of a better life as a cleaner in Austria and our aforementioned Austrian drop-kick gets a job delivering candy machines with his step father in the Ukraine. The scenes in an elderly hospital in particular are incredible, the patients are impossibly old and it’s difficult to imagine they are even acting. And maybe they’re not, as Seidl in the extra features mentions he uses non professional actors and never writes dialogue, offering what some critics have called a ‘grotesque realism,’ to the film. Despite the grimness of the economic inequality, Seidl mines unexpected moments of humor, warmth and beauty within the despair. His film is messy like life, highly stylized and beautifully crafted, though also an intensely powerful and confronting cinematic experience.

Patrick (Umbrella) is one of the seedier (read better) examples of Ozploitation, where a comatose young murderer develops the horn for his nurse and conspires to wreak havoc on any of her prospective suitors. He does this of course without moving a muscle, without blinking, just spitting occasionally. He’s evil, telekinetic, immobile and horny, a pretty special combination. He’s also not altogether subtle in letting the object of his desires know how he feels. Whilst typing a memo his nurse drifts into a daydream. She then looks back at what she’s written. ‘Patrick wants his hand job now.’ It all comes across as a b-grade Alfred Hitchcock homage (rip off), something director Richard Franklin (Psycho 2) acknowledges proudly in his commentary, and he should be proud. Patrick is a cracker.

Ministry of Fear (Directors Suite) is an incredible film noir from German expatriate Fritz Lang (Metropolis). It’s a 1944 adaptation from a Graham Greene novel that sends you on your ass immediately and has you breathlessly playing catch up from then on in. It’s equally measured and ludicrous with great performances from Ray Milland wondering why everyone is so obsessed with cake, and dapper noir sleaze-bag Dan Duryea. Lang’s Western Union (Directors Suite) however is a little less exhilarating, a by the numbers matinee Western which despite some curious point of view shots from buffalos at the beginning plays it nice and predictable for your sunday afternoon viewing.

If the sight of Ghandi attempting to bone Mary Kate Olsen isn’t disturbing enough then perhaps the fact that Sir Ben Kingsley plays a psychiatrist swapping therapy for pot may give you some insight into the disarray at the core of The Wackness (Madman). It’s self conscious American indie cool cinema with a Cameron Crowe like nostalgia for 1994, for coming of age and for troubled folks finding solace in each other. There are some genuine moments of humour and invention here and Ghandi is like we’ve never seen him before, repeatedly hilarious, totally unhinged, swallowing every drug he can find and dispensing curious advice and counseling to our dope dealing teen hero.

Fragmented Frequencies – 1st April 09

Possibly the greatest thing Fragmented Frequencies has ever heard ever, in the history of ever, is track five of the new Syringe Stick Up Mamma (Who Says Records/ Dual Plover) album. Whilst the rest of the album is an erratic blast of unhinged politically incorrect at times verbally abusive socially conscious hip hop, with breathless and stupidly fast rhymes over inventive, dense at times break-core beats, I Shit On Ya! takes everything to an entirely new level. It’s a level so dangerous and inventive that the air up there is so thin that few ever get there, and those that do can’t remain there for too long. It starts normal enough (or at least normal in the context of this album which anywhere else would be very very weird), with a bit of Eastern European accented ranting over industrial 4/4 beats, yet then the real ranting begins, the music stops, almost like it gives up, knowing that it can’t even begin to compete with the genius that is about to follow. Or flow. It’s a torrent of abuse for the next eight and a half minutes, a’ cappella ranting as the MC lets all those pent up grudges out, and it’s like opening the floodgates as we get swamped until we can barely breathe. ‘Cunts who are too weak to burn bridges, I shit on ya,’ ‘anyone who’s name starts with the letter a I shit on ya,’ he rails. Yet this is a far reaching totally insane and unfocussed rant so everything is fair game. You dobbed on him in kindergarten? Guess what? He remembers and shits on ya. No one is spared, even the ’sissy’ who turned off the sound on the mic because he was spitting at the Empress the other week, or a pizza place who doesn’t put enough spinach on his pizzas. That’s right, he shits on ya. By about five minutes his flow gets scattered, he loses track, tangents away and any semblance that this was ever music, and not just a random potty mouthed unhinged lunatic is gone. What makes it so great is of course that it’s hilarious and wrong, but mostly because there’s no censorship or polish. This is not studio trickery or even rehearsal. This is straight up pure improvisation. This music is blood pouring from a wound and no one’s bothering with band aids. Speaking of wounds, ACMI seem intent on picking the scab and reminding us of the demise of Melbourne’ s best record store a few years back. Synesthesia is a periodic experimental music and audio visual night held in Studio One up until the 18th of May. Over the coming months artists like Qua, Jean Poole and Ang Fang Quartet will be featured, though the series kicks off with colourful electro pop of Mink Engine on the 9th of April whilst the 23rd sees local AV laptop collective Outpost team up with digital messiah Robin Fox who will dust off his oscilloscope for the performance. The best thing about all these performances is that they’re free. After being subjected to the traversty of Queens of the Stone Age you may be surprised to learn that desert rock is alive and well. The desert of course being the Sahara. Tinariwen are one of the most soulful and inspiring bands around, melding an incredible back-story with some of the most distinctive and evocative blues tinged music you will ever hear. Fragmented Frequencies can’t hear their music without being transported back to the Sahara. They’re in town playing at Hamer Hall tonight. Of course the Melbourne International Jazz Festival is in town from the 26th of April and this year there’s some interesting internationals. Highlights include improv legend Cecil Taylor, guitarist Bill Frisell, Wilco guitarist Nels Cline (who’s doing a free improv show with Oren Ambarchi and will be interviewed in these very pages) and Ornette’s old bass player Charlie Haden. ACMI are coming to the party with a Jazz on Screen season that includes Sun Ra’s Space is the Place, the making of Charlie Haden’s recent country foray Rambling Boy, the portrait of iconic trumpeter Chet Baker in Let’s Get Lost, Jazz on A Summers Day and the excellent Mancini scored seedy noir masterpiece A Touch Of Evil, from that great man Orson Welles.

Fragmented Films 15th of March 09

 

Within the first five minutes of Mad Dog Morgan (Umbrella), Dennis Hopper, with a deep Irish brogue cold cocks an aggressive trooper, smokes opium in the Chinese settlement, then watches as his friend’s head explodes in a racially motivated attack. Failing as a gold prospector he turns to highway robbery and terrorises wealthy landowners. When asked in the extras how he approached the role, Hopper laughs, “well, a lot of rum.” He’s playing the Australian bushranger amongst a veritable who’s who of Australian 70’s alumni like Jack Thompson, Frank Thring, Bill Hunter and David Gulpilil, who teams up with Hopper on his crime spree. The director, Phillippe Mora recalls Gulpilil going walkabout during the shooting. When asked why he said “I had to ask the kookaburras and trees about Dennis.”  “Well what did they say?” Asked Mora. “They all said that Dennis is crazy.” In fact Hopper was so consumed by the role that when shooting finished he visited Morgan’s grave, drank  a fifth of Rum and started tearing up the cemetery. Driving away he was promptly arrested by police, blood tested him, pronounced legally dead, and hauled in front of a judge who told him that not only was he forbidden to drive in Victoria, he wasn’t even permitted to be a passenger. They then put him on a plane and sent him back the the U.S. It’s a great film. Hopper plays Morgan as a tormented rock star, or perhaps as himself, a spoiled drug crazed alcoholic actor on a downward spiral towards unemployment. The extras include Mora’s audio commentary, a radio interview, and 30 mins of Mora interviewing Hopper, discussing everything from the French New Wave to Easy Rider.

 

The 1957 Oscar for best screenplay was awarded to Robert Rich for The Brave One. However he never bothered to pick it up. It’s because he didn’t write it. He was a patsy, one of many. It was written by Dalton Trumbo under a pseudonym as in 1947 he was hauled before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un American Activities Committee and refused to answer their questions or name names. He was subsequently jailed and blacklisted by Hollywood. Trumbo (Madman) documents this experience and explores how his stand affected his life, career and family, via archival interviews, telling excerpts from his films such as Pappilon and Spartacus, current day interviews with his family and friends, and most importantly his personal letters. These amazing letters are read by the likes of Liam Neeson, Donald Sutherland, Joan Allen, and David Strathairn. Witty, verbose and brutally honest, they reveal a resolute man struggling against a society hellbent on punishing him. It’s telling that Michael Douglas reads the letter where Trumbo discusses the blood on Robert Rich’s Oscar. His father Kirk’s interview is perhaps the most affecting here. Approaching 90, speech impaired, he talks of looking back on his life and reflecting on what he is most proud of: giving Trumbo a screen credit for Spartacus in 1970 and thus effectively ending the blacklist.

 

Like Animal Farm, The Crucible, or even the Bible (unless you’re from Hillsong), Lord of The Flies (Directors Suite) is an allegorical tale. This means that it shouldn’t necessarily be taken literally, that it’s a less explicit way to explore important themes or ideas that may be a little too sensitive to touch on head on. Yet on any level Peter Brook’s film is a cracker. Made for $150,000 in 1963, shot in black and white with non professional actors and crew on an island near Puerto Rico, Brooks captures a curious mix of documentary realism and stylised artifice. It feels like a uniquely psychological form of filmmaking, utilsing improvisation, an amazing amount of edits and a very articulate feel for both score and sound design. It’s a film, like William Golding’s famous book that demonstrates mankind’s perilous proximity to violence and anarchy once the artifice of law is dropped. 

 

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Beyond) is one of the first horror movies ever, a German silent from 1920, it’s one of the most famous examples of the German Expressionism, with highly stylised dark and menacing sets with stark geometric shadows. It focusses on a series of murders and is clouded in mystery and the fantastic. In fact it’s so genuinely spooky that it’s surprising it hasn’t been remade with Naomi Watts.