Garage 2005 :
22. July – 13. August 2005 Stralsund / Germany
friends
Seen links, Schlösser rechts . And despite the fact that this collection of films is ranging from Krautrock to German post-avantgarde, you will not get to see yet another contribution from the Tödliche Doris. For that, please look elsewhere. Here, you will for example be accompanying Anima on their 1971 tour through Europe in a self-built trailer, a little boy will inform us about the origin of Duesseldorf’s legendary punk outfit Charly’s Girls, and finally, a grown up girl will tell us how she makes music.
Anima-Sound – Europa Tournee mit 20 km/h (Touring Europe With 20 km/h)
Filmed by the SWR in 1971, this documentary accompanies the artists Paul and Limpe Fuchs, their two children and their musical project „Music For Everybody“ on a three month long tour through Europe. This they undertook with an old tractor hauling a self constructed trailer, which could be converted into a stage. It enabled them to perform wherever they were (un)invited, be it Munich’s pedestrian zone, in front of an audience of miners in the Ruhr District or in the open, under the stars. Their archaic means of transportation also served as their home for these three months. Anima-Sound play their freeform noise improvisations on self constructed instruments, percussion an electronics. As the commentator of the films puts it aptly: “Anima Sound is a form of mental and physical baring.” This film has never been rerun or shown anywhere in public after its initial broadcast on German television in 1971. It is one of the few substantial and totally unique documentaries of the Krautrock-era.
Authors : Ludwig Andus, Rolf Hampe, Alfred Luft
Production : SWF
Produced in Germany, 1971
Length: 40 min.
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Guten Morgen Hose (Good Morning Trouseres)
A neo-dadaist short opera by Holger Hiller (ex-Palais Schaumburg) with Andreas Dorau playing the lead. The content can be summarized as follows: The film is about the interaction of the spatially isolated Dorau with a woman with trouts, a choir of trousers and a singing carpet, which gets stabbed by Dorau shortly before the latter succumbs to his own madness. This filmic essay can also be interpreted as a proclamation of the end of the so-called NDW’s (New German Wave) positivistic era of the, which by 1984 had already passed its commercial and creative peak.
Authors : Andreas Dorau, Holger Hiller
Script : Catherine Lienert
Technical assistant : S. Golmann
Performed by Die Doraus und die Marinas + Claudia Kalof
Produced in Germany, 1984
Length: 12 min.
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Charley’s Girls
In this film, the grandson of Franz Bielmeier (one of the Girls’ founding members besides Peter Hein and Markus Oehlen) gives an account on the beginnings and the early period of Punk in Duesseldorf between 1977 and 1979 from his own point of view (which is charming and not in the least bit naive). Formally, the is a collage based on Astrid Heibachs photo- and film-archive of this time and functions on many different levels. Plus it is an excellent supplement to Jürgen Teipels’ successful documentary novel „Verschwende Deine Jugend“ (Waste Your Youth). Astrid Heibach has been a photo- and video-artist since the seventies. She’s been awarded the Deutscher Videokunstpreis (German prize for videoart) in 1992.
Script, camera, cut: Astrid Heibach
Director: Astrid Heibach
Production: Astrid Heibach, Cologne 2005
Actors: Franz Bielmeier, Peter Hein
Music: Franz Bielmeier
Narrator: Marco Heibach
Englishe translation : Albert Haas
Length : 22 min.
Produced in 2005
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How To Make Music With Niobe
An intimate short feature by the Cologne-based production duo Graw Böckler on the musician and singer Yvonne Cornelus (also from Cologne), who experiments in the fields of electro-acoustic, improvisation and songwriting under the name of Niobe. Cornelus open-heartedly explains the guidelines and criteria with which she shapes her music, without ever dealing in depth with technical parameters.
Script and production: Graw Böckler
Directors: Graw Böckler
Actor : Yvonne Cornelus
Produced in Germany, 2004
Length: 10 min.
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Poemproducer by AGF
videoclip by lars nagler with music by antje greie. AGFs music merges a field of tension between generative laptop improvisation, beat deconstructions and her processed voice. naglers visual translation switches between abstract, structural patterns and shots of AGF in steady synchronisation.
video : Lars Nagler
music : AGF
produced : germany 2004
length : 6 min
www.radio-airport.de
www.poemproducer.com
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grinders
In how far Circuit Bending is a purely American outsider phenomenon is a question which Derek Shybell does not answer in his two features on the subject. Tom Hovinbøle is also unable (or unwilling) to come up with an answer in his interview epic. As in Skills, he is interested in social parameters and the aesthetic discourse of an internationally operating network, which detached itself from the cynical aphorisms of the *industrial culture *a long time ago.
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Nor Noise
What started life as a documentary on Norwegian noise-activist Lasse Marhaug soon progressed into a real stocktaking of the international noise scene’s present state from Norway to Japan. For Nor Noise, Tom Hovinbøle conducted a dozen interviews about aesthetic, cultural and technical questions and thus generated a straightforward and unpretentious portrait of a self-sufficient and non-commercial subculture and its global network.
Featured artists : Tore H. Bøe (Origami Republika), David Cotner (USA), Masami Akita (Merzbow), Lasse Marhaug (Jazzkammer), Tashimaru Nakamura (Japan), Arm (Aleksander Rishaug, Arne Borgan, Are Mokkelbost), Asbjørn Flø (Oslo), Maja S.K. Ratkje (Spunk, Fe-mail), Kjell Runar Jenssen (DEL), Francisco Lopéz (Spain), Helge Sten (Deathprod) and Otomo Yoshihide (Japan)
Script, technical direction : Tom Hovinbøle
Director: Tom Hovinbøle
Production : Pastiche Films
Produced in 2004
Length: 115 min.
www.ohmrecords.no
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Skills
A documentary by the filmmaker Jan van Hasselt from Bremen (Germany) which adheres to one of the theories of Villem Flusser. At its center are three of the noise-scene’s front performers: Zbigniew Karkowski, bad boy of the harsh and one-dimensional laptop noise; Lukas Abela, Australian extreme performer who for some time has been using contact microphones attached to easily breakable glass among his performance instruments; last not least there’s Rudolf Eb.er, Swiss Kung-Fu-teacher with a predilection for feces and a carte blanche for crossing ethic borders. Between the performers’ bits, one gets to see a computer pickled in oil and a bad tempered Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, which have been assigned the function of hosts.
Script, production : Jan van Hasselt
Director: : Jan van Hasselt
Produced in 2005 (Germany)
Length: 35 min.
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What is Circuit Bending?
Wow and flutter-like clip collage by New Yorker-based Derek Saybel on the impossibilities of Circuit Bending. Children’s toys soldered to car horns, cracked consumer electronics plus board’n’pot-madness to eleven provide a foretaste of Saybel’s documentary on the annual Circuit Bending meeting BENT in 2004 and show how easily everyday life can be manipulated.
Production : Derek Saybel
Produced in 2002
Length: 6 min.
http://absurdity.biz
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Bent 2004
Documentary by Derek Saybel on The First International Festival Of Circuit Bending, which was held in April 2004 for a week in New York. Circuit Bending is a technique which manipulates circuits and boards of consumer electronics, ordinary and cheap musical instruments, keyboards and everything that generates sound. Over the last few years, it has become very popular with the American noise scene. Bent reveals an independent network, whose vital tool is the soldering iron, which it uses very un-nerdy in performances. It is also the most important tool against a culture which is being increasingly dominated by digital media.
Production: Derek Saybel
Produced in 2004
Length: 60 min. (excerpt)
http://absurdity.biz
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Joyce Hinterding – The amplified music of weather storms and electro-magnetic fields
Sydney-based composer Joyce Hinterding works with multiple amplified electromagnetic fields, acoustic phenomena and microtonal traces of sound from the airwaves in her compositions. The documentary shows her at work in the studio and accompanies her on sonic explorations into the unheard. This film was produced as one episode of a six part music documentary series titled “Subsonics”, which was produced by Alison & Brendan Walls together with Oren Ambarchi for Australian television in 2001.
Script + production : Alison + Brandan Walls, Oren Ambarchi
Directors: Alison + Brandan Walls, Oren Ambarchi
Produced in 2004
Length: 10min.
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makers
A kind of “Making-of”, which is more than just a bonus: After a historic feature on the cutting of shellac discs and an introduction to stereophony, Mika Taanila delves into the shallow waters of Dutch Muzak-productions and Alan Zweig portrays a hardcore record collector who after the film’s shooting dies of his addiction in a rather obscure way… .
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Rca Victor presents Command Performance
An industry film produced by RCA Victor in 1942. It shows the complex sequence of operations in the production of a record in the pressing plants of RCA Victor Camden in New Jersey. From the cutting of the matrix and the electroplation with copper, nickel and chromium to the stamper, from the pasting of the label to storage, packing and shipping, every step in the production of this wonderful storage medium is explained.
Produced in 1942 (USA)
Production: RCA Victor
Length : 15 min.
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DVD Manufacturing + Vinyl Cut
Two features dealing with the production process of storage media. DVD Manufacturing explains the production steps from the authoring via the production of a glassmaster to the copies, while Vinyl Cut accompanies all important steps in the process of cutting a record.
Production : Sensemusic
Produced in 2004 (Germany)
Length : 10 + 6 min.
by courtesy of
www.berlin-digital.com
www.sensemusic.de
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Scratch
Christoph Girardet’s FoundFootage-collage loops scenes from diverse films in which a record-player or gramophone appears, while substituting the original soundtrack with a loop from the inner groove of a record.
Production: Christoph Girardet
Produced in 2004 (Germany)
Length : 4 min
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Rca Victor presents how to listen to New Dimensions in Sound
Industrial film produced by RCA to promote the advent of stereo record players in 1957. The film explains in detail the features of stereophony and how sound and acoustics function. This feature is still recognizable as a film meant to advertise a new product, but has retained a lot entertainment value apart from nostalgia. “The remarkable achievements of modern electronic recording make possible the truest reproduction of original musical presentation.”
Produced in 1957 (USA)
Production: RCA Victor
Length: 15 min.
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Thank you for the Music
In this film, the Finnish filmmaker Mika Taanila gets to the bottom of the phenomenon of Muzak, the specially recorded programmed background music, which is supposed to have an effect on the customers well-being and influence him/her in his/her buying patterns. Taanila conducted interviews with the producers Joseph Lanza (USA) and Theo van Leeuwen (NL) about the possibilities and the shortcomings of functionalized music: He also visits Van Leeuwens houseband, the Paul Natte Orchestra in their Hilversum studio, which for the last 30 years has been the most important production location for Muzak in Europe.
“By taking away the ego of the artists, background music allows the listener to fill in the blanks.” – Joseph Lanza
Script + cut: Mika Taanila
Director: Mika Taanila
Producer: Lasse Saarinen
Screenplay: Mika Taanila & Anton Nikkilä
Sound : Pietari Koskinen
Production : For Real Productions
Produced in 1997 (Finnland)
Length: 24 min.
www.kinotar.com
www.muzak.com
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Vinyl
Being a filmmaker as well as a longtime record collector, Alan Zweig was almost predestined to make a movie on the more or less highly charged topic of collecting vinyl (ok, /and /shellac). Vinyl attempts to answer the big questions about the subject – does it create identity or are collectors just archivists? Is it a utopia or just an escapism of nerds? – by means of interviews. Zweig filmed collectors in an advanced stage of collecting, people whose collections dominate 100% of their day to day life and whose collections demand more time for care and maintenance than is possible. And in a few cases this passion has become quite painful. Taking into consideration that this film was made before eBay made its big impact on record collecting, it is an interesting snapshot of collecting in the good old days.
Production : Alan Zweig
Produced in the USA, 2001
Length: 110 min.
Language: english
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phasers
This is where it all started: Thurston and the Phasers even appear twice, while Maryanne Amacher and Bruce Haack are portrayed in depth – after all, both of them have instigated changes of paradigms in their small fields of musical activities (similar to Thurston Moore, but then he has already been credited.)
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Haack – The King of Techno
As composer of extremely bizarre children’s records and commercials, Bruce Haack has enjoyed a dubious celebrity. The fact, that before he did all this he developed experimental synthesizers (which alas never made it to production stage) and that he experimented with the techniques of Musique Concrète has been acknowledged only too seldom (the becomes especially evident when put in contrast to the icon that has been made of Robert Moog). In interviews and original footage, the tragic career of this American maverick composer is traced up until his death.
Script +production: Philip Anagnos
Direction: Philip Anagnos
Production: Thinkbubble Films
Produced in the USA, 2004
Length: 70 min.
www.haackmovie.com
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Day Trip Maryanne
Since the late 60s, Maryanne Amacher has been active as a multimedia artist, and has among other things assisted John Cage. Her output as a sound artist in her own right is rather slim and her live performances are rare occasions. One afternoon, Thurston Moore and Andrew Kesin pay Amacher a visit in her studio-cum apartment. This ad hoc meeting is filmed and from this footage Kesin cut a rough shot-on-location under the title ‘Day Trip Maryanne’.
Production : Andrew Kesin
Camera: Andrew Kesin + Jonathon Bekemeier
Produced in the USA, 2004
Length: 30 min.
www.ecstaticpeace.com
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Thurston Moore about Day Trip Maryanne
Thurston Moore in an interview with Andrew Kesin about the shooting of “Day Trip Maryanne”.
Production : Andrew Kesin
Produced in the USA, 2004
Length: 12 min.
www.ecstaticpeace.com
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Tujiko Noriko – Mugen Kyuukou, How To Believe In Jesus
The video of Tujiko Noriko from Japan comes alive in the interplay of its three visual planes. The basic shot is a statue of Jesus shrouded in wafts of mist. On it, a catalogue of effects is projected while parallel to that, the names of the effects are given in the top right hand corner of the screen.
Production: Graw Böckler
Produced in Germany, 2004
Length: 4min
www.raumfuerprojektionen.de
www.tomlab.de
pranksters
It seems that people have more sense for good pranks in most places of the world but here. Be that as it may, but you’d better take care that Caveh Zahedi and Will Oldham on mushrooms will not crawl under your skin that much and that Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard will not fool you with their remake of the legendary Cramps gig at the Napa State Hospital. If all of this seems to make as much sense as Charlemagne Palestine’s legendary roundtrip and the University of Wisconsin’s choir interpreting Nintendo-themes a capella.
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Island Song
With a video camera strapped to his body, Charlemagne Palestine drives around an island on his motorbike while chanting in true mantra-fashion “Gotta get outta here…gotta get outta here…”. Palestine’s voice dissolves into the sound of the motor, and one realizes the
impossibility of escaping from the island. Fatalism spreads. But Island Song can also be seen as a motion study since it corresponds to other works of Palestine from the same period.
Production: Charlemagne Palestine
Produced in the USA, 1976
Length: 16 min.
not subtitled
www.charlemagnepalestine.org
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File Under Sacred Music
Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s File Under Sacred Music is based on a rare video bootleg of legendary garage band The Cramps, which was recorded at a live appearance at Napa Mental Institute, California, way before the band released their first record. The Cramps played this show in front of an audience which consisted of the inmates of a psychiatric ward. For File Under Sacred Music, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard put together a band looking uncannily like The Cramps and in coorporation with people accredited from free psychiatric groups as the audience tried to reenact this exceptional event as closely to the original as possible. But take note: This is not a remake.
Production: Iain Forsyth + Jane Pollard
Lights + Camera: Stuart Roweth
Cut: Robin Mahoney
Director: Robin Mahoney
Live Sound: Charlie Poulet
Assistant producer: Helen Dowling
Produced in the UK, 2004
Length: 22 min.
not subtitled
www.fileundersacredmusic.com
www.iainandjane.com
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8-bit Acapella
This short film portrays the valiant attempt of the Univerity Of Wisconsin Choir to interpret Nintendo title themes acapella. During the performance, some of the choir’s members play “characters” from games and give ample proof of their abilities as actors in the roles of Luigi or even Tetris-elements. This film has been in “heavy circulation” on the internet, and has been one of the top downloads of the last months.
Producers + Actors : Univerity of Wisconsin-Choir
Produced in the USA, 2004
Length: 5 min.
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You Have Bad Taste In Music
In You have bad taste in music, Eman Laerton, who is both producer and leading actor in this film, goes where being a fan hurts the most: Equipped with a megaphone and dressed in a costume which can only be called absurd, he confronts fan mobs at Linkin Park concerts with the idea of taste, of “good” and “bad” music, without ever outing himself as a provocateur. YHBTM could also work as a slot on MTV, if it wasn’t for that pinch of meta-information: “Do not attend this concert, stop listening to bad music, turn off your radio and television!!”
Producer: Eman Laerton,
Produced in the USA, 2004-05
Length: 20 min. (selection)
english
www.youhavebadtasteinmusic.com
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Tripping With Caveh
It is Caveh Zahedi’s fondness for experimental setups in films and his love for Will Oldham’s music, which makes Tripping With Caveh such a wonderfully intimate concept-feature. Caveh’s unusual invitation to take hallucinogenic mushrooms with him is followed by a visit of Will Oldham and two days of a friendly and intimate living together in rural surroundings. We see Caveh and Oldham fleeing from a swarm of hornets, discussing love and coming down together at the pool.
Production: Caveh Zahedi
Camera: Thomas Logoreci + Greg Watkins
Cut: Caveh Zahedi + Sarah Marx
Music: Will Oldham
Produced in the USA, 2004
Length : 32 min.
english
www.cavehzahedi.com
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Ariel Pink – Worn Copy Video Selection
A selection of videos from the American leftfield-pop shooting star Ariel Pink’s first album Worn Copy from 2005 : For Kate I Wait, Trepanated Earth, Life in LA, Lover Boy, Bloody! (Bagonia’s), Almost waiting, Beverly Kills
Production : Paw Tracks
Produced in 2004
Length: 20 min.
www.paw-tracks.com
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So Wrong They’re Right
So Wrong They’re Right addresses a phenomenon largely unknown in Europe: The 8track-collector. The 8track is/was a cassette-like cartridge with magnetic tape, which used to be a very popular sound storage medium in the US during the 60s and 70s. It was distributed almost exclusively by major companies and thanks to eBay and the internet has experienced a renaissance during the last few years. Its community in America is more active than ever. Tiny Tim, David Byrne and Gumball are among the collectors portrayed.
Production: Russ Forster
Director: Russ Forster
Co-producer : Dan Sutherland
Produced in the USA, 2005
Length: 100 min.
english