MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS!!
guest curator: Brian C. Short
SOUND & MOTION
“Sacred Revolution” by Susanna, from the album Triangle, released by SusannaSonata. Video by Helge Sten, whom some may know as Deathprod. Sourced from the moire patterns of a CRT monitor, this oceanic video is both subtle and precise.
MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS!!
guest curator: Brian C. Short
SOUND & MOTION
The Park – Privacy Rules is the first part of Robert Ashley’s four-part opera for television, Perfect Lives. First broadcast in 1983, its vintage shows in the chunky video compositing, effects, et al. Neither can I speak well for its unfortunate costuming choices, or even much of the music. I think the real power of this work lies in the text and Ashley’s delivery of it, and given that context, there is a certain consistent sensibility to the presentation, in that it sustains a vivid sense of the hypnagogic, and that is hauntingly effective. The soundtrack to this opera provided near-constant background to work I was doing in 1996, and when colleagues heard what I was listening to, they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. but I wanted nothing more than to find my own voice in it. Instead, I found that Ashley’s voice had subsumed me, was always there – not in the background anymore, but foregrounded, an orthogonal commentary to everything I thought, said, did… and it took years for that to stop happening. I’m not exactly sure it has stopped happening. I do love that words are simply plastered with seeming arbitrariness over image.
MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS!!
guest curator: Brian C. Short
SOUND & MOTION
This week’s clip is the video for Valgeir Sigurðsson’s “Between Monuments” (from his 2012 album “Architecture of Loss”). The piece is a beautiful example of contemporary classical music currently produced in Iceland – also from the Reykjavik-based Bedroom Community label, as was last week’s piece by Ben Frost – and the animation that accompanies it is quite strong, both for its aesthetic merits, and for its address of the societal and environmental issues resulting from the (over)development of Iceland today. Though I am leery of didacticism in art, this piece holds a balance, speaking directly to the emotional sparsity of the music while both conveying and superseding any moral message beyond itself.
Video directed by Thomas Pons, with additional animation by Julie Stephen Chheng, Natalianne Boucher, and Sarah Escamilla.
MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS!!
guest curator: Brian C. Short
SOUND & MOTION
I want to concentrate on the close relation between music and the moving image. This of course is nothing new, but is an intrinsic relationship within cinema, and has been since the earliest days of silent films projected to musical accompaniment. But there are moments when image and sound speak to one another quite directly, beyond the emotional or thematic cues of a musical soundtrack in support of storytelling, or the beats an editor may cut against in a commercial work to match its rhythm or compress a “message” into 30 seconds exactly. There are moments when not only does the music enhance the image, but the reverse also happens, when image supplements music, and the two become a singular, dynamic whole very much like dance. Perhaps it is because I worked for a few years in the particular rigors of advertising post production, or because I grew up in the era of the music video as media wallpaper, but it is within the condensed interplay of music-to-image that I now find my work naturally gravitates, and that I would like to consider here. Because my own work tends to fall within or very near the framework of a music video, I want to feature a number of similar pieces, most of which are intended as music videos, though of a sort that I think transcends their function with a particular experimentalist edge.
This week’s post is a short music video for Ben Frost’s album AURORA, on the Icelandic label Bedroom Community, which Frost co-founded with label-mates Valgeir Sigurðsson and Nico Muhly. The film is one of a series of three by Trevor Tweeten and Richard Mosse, and it speaks, albeit in a slightly elliptical way, to the visceral impact of Frost’s music, which is itself both abstract and direct.
https://youtu.be/ISTL9FPkUVI?list=RD-Gig7e5lwOE