Skanu Mezs 2006 :
8.+9. September 2006 Riga / Latvia
Music Studio – Harry Partch
Madeline Tourtelot, USA 1958, 17 min
As a music instrument inventor and autodidact composer Harry Partch was always accessible to present his work through other forms of art, he invited chicago-based filmmaker Madeline Tourtelot to collaborate on a series of four films : Music Studio, as one of them, sees Partch in the studio demonstrating his self-built instruments and gives the viewer the rare occasion participiating at the recording-process of a piece. Music Studio, as a cultural artefact, is a rarely screened and very early example for the music film documentary genre, and gives an impressive view over the mid-period of that unique and outstanding artist Harry Partch and his visionary work.
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Pilgrimage from scattered points
Luke Fowler, UK 2006, 45 min
A film about the english composer Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra, that Cardew formed back in 1968 from his ‘experimental music’ class as an fluid collective of students, office employees, amateur musicians and professional composers to explore the boundaries of group improvisation and social engineering on the other hand. Fowler’s film attends the internal contradictions and struggles of the Scratch Orchestra through first person interviews, recent and archival footage and predominantly unreleased music and skillfully expands the narration of the documentary through techniques of experimental film making.
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Small steps – Conversations with Pauline Oliveros
Andrew Kesin, USA 2006, 30 min
Small steps is a glimpse into the life of the legendary founder of Deep Listening (the space & the band), Pauline Oliveros. Since the 1960s Oliveros’ work is primarily focused in the world of sonic exploration whose attention strategies, improvisational skills and playful sensibility had a huge impact on the development of recent electronic and electro-acoustic music. A series of intimate conversations, panel discussions and live performances shows that Oliveros is driven by a profound desire of social intention to make existence a little enjoyable for all of us.
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Optical Sound
Mika Taanila / music : The User, FIN 2005, 6 min
Optical Sound is based on the live performance of the ,Symphony for 12 Dot Matrix Printers’ by the canadian artist duo [The User]. The film inter-cuts close-ups of the mechanical parts of the printers performing the piece, taken from surveillance cameras placed inside the machines. Images of ASCII files’ score which have been photocopied onto clear film without the use of a camera, being played by the printer ensemble.These images are contrasted and rhythmically arranged with time-lapse footage of large modern office blocks shot from the streets in Mika Taanilas hometown Helsinki.
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Backscatter
Robin Fox, AUS 2004, 10 min. excerpt
Australian conceptual sound artist Robin Fox’ composition for the cathode ray oscilloscope is based on the simple electro-technical effect that electricity generates sound to excite a single light photon across a phosphorous screen. The result of this one-to-one audio-visual relationship is as obvious as breathtaking and its psycho-acoustic quickly soakes the viewer in a constant flow of synaptic stimulation and mental awareness. Backscatter can be seen as a fine example for academic techniques that evolves a deep, trance-like state, that hits the mark through its simplicity, richness and variety in form and patterns.
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Nachtreich
Column One / music : Afanassi Vieberg, FRG 2002, 9 min
From the large archive of film collage by berlin-based multi-performers Column One comes this outstanding found footage work that modulates the exotism of the early days of multicolor hollywood cinema into a dreamlike and bizarre state of sleepy consciousness. Whilst the pictures starting off as a blurry and repetitive desertstorm nightmare, a monologuish reflection on the weakness of the human being starts and soon ends in an argument with a ghost voice from the aether. As most work by Column One, Nachtreich (realm of night) demonstrates the dehydrated hallucinatory effects of the (human) desert and gives an unsettling idea of the absolute innersphere at the end of its day.
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Love Song
Janek Schaefer , UK 2003, 4 min
With this film Uk-based sound artist and turntable-expert Janek Schaefer, finally turns out as a lover-boy : Love Song, developed as a concept during Schaefer’s honeymoon, sees the seven women of his family sing the word Love seven separate times at seven different pitches. These 49 variations of love are composed in blocks of personal relationship, so that the word is sung a total of 220 times. The result is a woven and beautifully warm sound texture that visually slowly overblends into a kitschy wallpaper arrangement of red glitter heart confetti, red love balloons and heart shaped‘love cats’ blankets.
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La Ciudad
Mpld / music : Criterion, USA 2005, 15 min, excerpt
As La Ciudad translates with ’city’, this shorty by brooklyn based video artist Mpld can be seen as a strong contrast to the rest of the program : whilst La Ciudad’s moving and constantly pulsating images tribute the adrenalinic and unstoppable flow of the urban surface of NYC, the music of Broklyn Beats artist Criterion ambivalently clashes the abstract of the noise-collage with the very concrete moment, when the stuttering and distorted broken beats get swinging. Both, music and image are subject to its place of origin and can be interpreted as a piece of contemporary urban folk art.
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Kill Time
Carsten Aschmann, FRG 2006, 18 min
Kill Time is a short movie about urban boredom, isolation and everyday life paranoia. Islandic artist Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson (also known of sound researchers Stilluppsteypa) is heavily ridden by an inner demon, but quickly finds an agreement with his misanthropic alter ego : “I tell you people are no good, they are cheap. I hate people.” Excessive consume, addiction and elitist ideas keeps his motivation up, the body of work legitimates the artists’ schizophrenia, but the constant lack of self-confidence powers the alienation and destruction of the self. This is a fine, but not too serious effort to deal with the idea of identity in the field of experimental arts, but not completely unmistakably.
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What About Me: The Rise of the Nihilist Spasm Band
Zev Asher, CAN 2000, 79 min
As an energetic full-feature documentation, What About Me spots on canada’s legendary experimental noise-music group The Nihilist Spasm Band. From its origins as a response to the ultra-conservative government of London Ontario in the late sixties, to the tragic death of one of its founding members, to the band’s tour of Japan in 1996, this film traces their history as a good entertaining off low-budget production. Blending 16 mm, super-8 archival footage with recent, digital production formats gives it a unique, rich texture that reflects the band’s multi-layered, improvisational style until today.
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