reviews: the machine room, lee ranaldo, swound!

The Machine Room - Love From a Distance EP (***)

Edinburgh’s The Machine Room resemble a morning-after Delphic; they won’t necessarily make you dance, but their romantic melancholy could comfortably soundtrack time spent rueing drunken mistakes and missed chances.

On opener Cost of Progress, John Bryden’s falsetto flirts with Mew over cold-packed guitar, while Your Head on the Floor Next Door is, lyrics aside, Love from a Distance’s highlight – a pace-dropping, New Order-indebted slice of electro balladry.

Their compatriot tracks also earn their place – Camino De Soda’s sparkly melody confirms it the natural choice for single status, while Picking Holes closes on a suitably grandiose note. But there’s aimlessness to certain stretches – a slackness that time will no doubt iron out, exposing their dreamy ore more fully, and fulfilling their undoubted potential.

Out 5th March

Lee Ranaldo - Between the Times and the Tides (****)

With any new Lee Ranaldo album, the first question to ask is: which Ranaldo? In Sonic Youth, his work veers from straight-up rock to obtuse noise; in his downtime, there’s improvised collaborations with jazz acts and wilfully avant-garde installation pieces to stretch his muse.

Between the Times and the Tides occupies the straightforward end of the scale, but its relative conservatism is rewarding; the general clarity of the guitar tones only accentuates Ranaldo’s immense skill (check out the dual-part introduction to Fire Island (Phases)), while the laid-back MOR gaits of tracks like Lost (Plane T Nice) or Stranded bear well the touch of Wilco’s Nils Cline, lending additional guitar throughout the album.

Other collaborators include Sonic Youth affiliates past (percussion from Bob Bert; bass from Jim O’Rourke) and present (Steve Shelley handles drums; John Agnello behind the desk), but above all, this is Ranaldo’s show: a confirmation of his solo talents just as his day job’s future seems rocky.

Out 26th March

Swound! - Into the Sea (***)

Choosing to package their debut full-length with a 76 minute in-the-studio documentary suggests the four brothers that make up Swound! aren’t lacking self-assurance. Admittedly, said doc is decidedly tongue-in-cheek, but it’s nonetheless a pretty confident statement from a band whose Wikipedia entry was deleted in 2010 for lack of interest/verified notability.

Into the Sea should ensure a reinstatement of their page, though it’s going to need a lot of hyperlinks: their family-friendly power-pop comes laden with geeky references, from Back to the Future in opener Your Kids Are Going to Love It, to a guest-appearance from Troll 2 star George Hardy on Big Trouble. Musically, their DNA is pretty transparent: Tokyo carries traces of days spent covering Blink-182; Rivers Cuomo is owed a song-writing credit or five; while they share more than witty promos with OK Go. Swound!’s exuberance has a high propensity to irritate, but they squeak through on goofy charm.

Out 5th March

GFF 2012: Chinese Take-Away

This will probably be the last of my Glasgow Film Festival film reviews - i saw and wrote about a bunch more stuff, but those reviews will most likely be banked for future cinema/dvd release dates. Twas an awesome festival all in all - Kid with a Bike, This Is Not a Film and Sleeping Sickness were the clear highlights in my eyes, but there were plenty more modest successes amongst the programme as well, including this:

Chinese Take-Away might well boast the oddest opening of the festival: on a serenely beautiful lake, an attempted proposal is interrupted by a cow falling from the sky and landing on the would-be finance. It’s one of several scenes of bizarre death peppered throughout the film, as curmudgeonly shopkeeper Roberto pores over newspaper cuttings for examples of life’s capriciousness. His surly demeanour distances those around him, but he soon experiences chance’s vagaries first-hand with the arrival of non-Spanish-speaking Jun, searching for his family in an unwelcoming Buenos Aires.

Chinese Take-Away’s bottom-line homilies – seize the day! Don’t judge a book by its cover! etc. - may be fortune cookie-deep, but, under cover of quirk, writer/director Sebastián Borensztein smuggles in a profundity as unexpected as it is rewarding. Jun regrettably remains a cypher, but this helps concentrate empathy on Roberto (played with pitch-perfect cantankerousness by Ricardo Darin), whose layers gradually unfurl as this handsomely-shot film edges towards its classy conclusion.

GFF 2012: Patience (After Sebald)

The literature of W.G. Sebald is an allusive and elusive subject for a documentary, his work consciously difficult to categorise. Early in Patience (After Sebald), publisher Christopher MacLehose recalls the author’s rejection of pigeonholes. “I want fiction, I want biography, I want travel, I want history… don’t put me in a box – I want to be in all the boxes” Sebald reportedly protested, and Grant Gee’s ambitious documentary attempts, with some success, to follow suit.

Patience is at once an art-house essay, a literary documentary, and a set of unconventional ‘reader notes’ for The Rings of Saturn (in which a walking holiday through East Anglia becomes a hub for ruminations on historical and geographical identity). By transmuting Sebald’s literary style into an approximated filmic equivalent, Gee makes clear his admiration for the writer, and while Patience…’s respectfully meandering gait (though both the Suffolk countryside and Rings…’s themes) lacks incisiveness, the combination of layered chiaroscuro photography and source-text readings is memorably evocative.

GFF 2012: The Somnambulists

Inspired emotionally by his anger over the Iraq war, and stylistically by Joanna Kane’s photography exhibition of the same name, Richard Jobson’s The Somnambulists is a sparse, polemical work. In a series of monologues, soldiers step out of darkness to recount their experiences at war, and Jobson strives to imbue each with a distinct voice: the scared squaddie comparing his tour to Call of Duty; the new father struggling to articulate his emotions over a satellite phone; the young medic aspiring to be a doctor. Impressive sound design augments each tale, with battlefield noise and omnipresent hums keeping the audience discomforted - as we should be, when faced with intense suffering in which we are complicit by default. But other directorial embellishments prove distracting, particularly the fractured editing and close-ups of fire-filled eyes; PTSD is one of conflict’s dark legacies, but to universalise it with clumsy symbolism risks stigmatising the very people Jobson seeks to speak on behalf of.

GFF 2012: Omar Killed Me

It’s obvious Omar Killed Me is based on fact; no fictional equivalent would make its central injustice so glaring. The film presents the murder conviction of Moroccan gardener Omar Rassad as a scandalous combination of falsified reports, xenophobic contempt and judicial malpractice on a terrible scale; corruption and ineptitude conspiring to imprison an innocent man.

Roschdy Zem – star of the Oscar-nominated Days of Glory and 2011 GFF hit Point Blank, amongst others – directs with confidence if not quite flair, the film strongest in an opening third that alternates between Omar’s arrest in 1991, and a writer’s investigation into the case three years later. This dual-thread later gives way to a more prosaic procedural structure, but as is so often the case with films by actors-turned-directors, any formal shortcomings are offset by the quality of the performances. Zem’s frequent co-star Sami Bouajila, in particular, is excellent in the lead role, convincingly internalising complex emotions: defiance, desperation, anger, and defeat.

GFF 2012: Cry Parrot presets Umberto

There are still tickets available for this apparently - get yerself along if horror's your bag.

With the contents of Umberto's special performance still shrouded in mystery, we talk to Cry Parrot's Fielding Hope about their collaboration for GMFF

Last summer, Fielding Hope of Glasgow-based DIY promoters Cry Parrot found himself discussing horror film music with instrumentalist Umberto, over from Kansas City for a sold-out show at the 13^th Note. Umberto, real name Matt Hill, is something of an aficionado: both his albums to date, From the Grave and Prophecy of the Dark Widow, slice up and cannibalise the synth-heavy soundtrack stylings of niche icons like Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento, to electrifyingly creepy effect. “For some of Umberto's performances in the States he would use cut-up footage of vintage horror flicks,” says Hope, “but when he told me he hadn't actually composed any specific film soundtrack before, I asked him what his feelings were on doing something as part of the Glasgow Music and Film Festival… Personally I think he's got lots of potential doing this sort of thing.”

From there, plans were made to bring the 'don of the dread' back to Glasgow for a very special performance: a newly-composed score for a secret film of his choice, to take place in a no-doubt fog-filled SWG3 (the 13^th Note show was apparently “a little damaging on everybody’s lungs, what with the amount of smoke machine abuse that was going on”). The show is one of several horror-related events at this year’s GMFF, and with the festival’s 2011 edition similarly nightmarish thanks to Italian giallo soundtrack titans Goblin, we ask Hope whether he thinks the genre naturally lends itself to music/film crossover events. “There’s no doubt the horror genre can raise some interesting discussions in terms of its connection with music,” agrees Hope. “As part of my dissertation in university I researched the psychological effect of sound, and how certain volumes, frequencies and timbres can have a profound impact on viewers. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why horror works so well in a live environment; its dynamics can keep an audience stimulated, excited and of course, scared!”

While Umberto is uniquely qualified for scoring old-school horror, we ask Hope who else he’d love to hear take on the task. “I think my favourite horror film ever has to be Halloween,” he says, “but personally I wouldn't want to hear a single change to the soundtrack! In a dream-world, if Demdike Stare and Lightning Bolt were somehow able to collaborate, I'd love to hear what they'd come up with for Evil Dead 2.” Even in concept form, the combination is nerve-shredding.

Tonight marks Cry Parrot’s second collaboration with the GMFF, and it’s a partnership Hope is keen to continue, citing the organisers’ open-minded approach, which permits “free reign to be as creative as possible” with programming. “It’s a brilliant platform for interesting smaller acts to attract a completely different audience and to try something refreshing and new,” he says of the festival’s potential for boundary-crossing. “And,” he hints promisingly, “I've still got lots of fairly ambitious ideas for the festival that I’d like to carry through with in the future.” Anyone got Lightning Bolt’s number?

GFF 2012: The Ecstasy of Order (interview with director Adam Cornelius)

The Ecstasy of Order screened at the GFF yesterday, and it was excellent - here's a wee feature written for the cineskinny.

From the earliest PCs to the latest smart-phones, Tetris extends further than most computer games. Its appeal is intuitive and addictive – and, as with any skill-based past-time, some take to it more seriously than others. The Ecstasy of Order focuses on the game’s most ardent players, as they vie for glory in the Tetris World Championships. “I’m not entirely sure this film would appeal to someone who literally has never played video games” reckons director Adam Cornelius. “Luckily for us, there aren’t many people who fit that description anymore. When I started in 2009, I was a little naïve about the massive popularity of Tetris – unbeknownst to me, it’s had a huge comeback as a cell phone game, selling over 100 million downloads worldwide. So it’s arguably the most played game ever at this point. This presented us with a rare opportunity to really explain the game in-depth; how the Tetris Masters perceive the game and play on an elite level.”

Cornelius’s previous documentary People Who Do Noise focused on Portland, Oregon’s experimental music scene, but despite obvious superficial dissimilarities, the director detects parallels between the two subjects. “In both cases you have a situation where human beings have developed almost an emotional or spiritual connection with modern technology,” he suggests. “In the case of Tetris, you hear people talk about the Tetris God, and that sense that it’s always withholding the piece you need. So it takes on a talismanic property; like a way of processing all the bad luck in real life. The masters have found ways to defy bad luck, which must be a very empowering feeling.”

As, er, ‘research’ for this article, we decide to chase that “empowering feeling”, and gauge our pro-player potential against the high scores featured in The Ecstasy of Order – a rather dispiriting comparison. We ask Cornelius how best to boost our relatively puny totals. “The best way to learn is to watch the games of the masters,” he counsels. “Take note of when they place a piece differently than you would have. Their move is almost always the far superior one. Try to figure out why. Repeat.” We heed his advice and, after several hours training, learn that: a) clearing four lines together maximises points; b) planning ahead is crucial; and c) we are never, ever going to make it to Level 14. Sigh.

GFF 2012: Jan Svankmajer

Today and tomorrow, 85A will be hosting the short films of Jan Svankmajer in a tricked-out Glue Factory. Here are a few words on the event, written for the Cineskinny (which you can read back issues of here).

In Alice, Jan Svankmajer’s 1988 feature length adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the titular narrator instructs the audience to close their eyes “or they won’t see anything.” She demands we close off reality and enter a dream-like world of Svankmajer’s creation, where sawdust-stuffed rabbits break free from their display cases, and pin cushions and socks transform into hedgehogs and caterpillars. The Prague-born filmmaker has occupied this oneiric realm throughout his career, from his debut short The Last Trick in 1964, in which marionette-like magicians perform outlandish tricks by multiplying their bodies and bringing furniture to life, through to the psychoanalytic dreamscapes of 2010’s Surviving Life (Theory and Practice).

Whether live action, animation, or, most often, a combination of the two, Svankmajer’s work celebrates the power of imagination in all its facets: absurd, fantastical, allegorical, and often unsettling. Svankmajer takes mundane reality and sculpts something uncanny: pebbles dance in formation in A Game with Stones (1965); steaks embrace in Meat Love (1989); diagrams step free from the page in Historia Naturae, Suita (1967). His stop-motion clay work makes corporeal forms fluid and erratic – see the grotesque assembly of Darkness, Light, Darkness (1990), or the melting busts in Dimensions of Dialogue (1983). His Food trilogy (1993), meanwhile – featuring human vending machines, Swiftian pica and self-destructive gluttony – still has the ability to put viewers off their dinner, as do the meaty, disembodied tongues that crop up throughout his filmography.

This year, art collective 85A have transformed The Glue Factory into a 'kunstkammer', or cabinet of curiosities, of which Svankmajer himself would surely approve. The exact film selection is not yet known, but the evening’s poster contains multiple clues – for starters, we spy Punch from 1968’s Punch and Judy, and the spiked typewriter from 1969’s A Quiet Week in the House amongst the miscellany. Each individual film will be screened in its own specially-constructed theatre, with costumed performers promising to “[coax] his surreal imagery off the screen and into life before you!” By smudging the line between onscreen and off-screen worlds, 85A promise an unusual, unique take on the Svankmajer canon, and whether you’re an existing acolyte or a curious newcomer, this surreal voyage is not to be missed.

GFF 2012: Backyard

In deciding to host an open-air concert in his garden, Árni Rúnar Hlöðversson cites modest intentions: “we just wanted to record some group of friends in a simple way,” he shrugs. Director Árni Sveinsson unfussily documents the resulting mini-festival from set-up to hot-tub wind-down, as the toast of Reykjavik’s music scene (local giants Bjork and Sigur Ros excepting) thrill an ever-growing crowd.

As you’d expect from so small a city, there’s a genuine sense of community amongst the participants, which makes the domestic nature of the venue (Hlöðversson’s flat is given over to coffee stations) rather apt. Musically, there’s plenty to enjoy, both familiar (Múm’s If I Were a Fish makes for a spellbinding centrepiece) and less well-known (Retro Stefson’s disco-rap and Reykjavik!’s hardcore screams deliver welcome variety). Both gig and film culminate with Hlöðversson’s band FM Belfast performing signature track Underwear, the ennui of its refrain “nothing ever happens here” firmly contradicted by the buzzing atmosphere they’ve helped create.

GFF 2012: The Mexican Suitcase

In the mid-nineties, three suitcases were unearthed in a closet in Mexico, containing negatives long-assumed lost: snaps taken during the Spanish Civil War by Gerda Taro, David ‘Chim’ Seymour, and Robert Capa. While the trio’s iconic photography is front and centre of The Mexican Suitcase, documentarian Trisha Ziff frames this fortuitous discovery as a catalyst for wider analysis of the war’s legacy, mapping the journey made by the suitcases to that of refugees who chose exile to Mexico over life under Franco. Interviews with historians and émigrés offer an array of insights (recollections of French refugee camps are particularly upsetting), while present-day Spanish youth air their frustration at the infrequency of such open national discussion. Capa’s oft-quoted dictum “if a photo doesn’t work then you’re not close enough” is invoked by one interviewee, but Ziff’s film impresses by adopting multiple distances, from the close-up excavation of mass graves to comparatively disassociated art exhibitions, all augmented by co-producer Michael Nyman’s evocative score.

saturday's playlist!

1. errors - tusk
2. azealia banks - slow hands
3. college - a real hero
4. of montreal - dour percentage
5. talking heads - road to nowhere
6. cults - abducted
7. best coast - bratty b
8. la sera - break my heart
9. sleater kinney - combat rock
10. bikini kill - double dare ya
11. pavement - gold soundz
12. john cale - all my friends
13. crocodiles - stoned to death
14. the cars - let's go
15. broken social scene - art house director
16. echo and the bunnymen - heads will roll
17. flatmates - don't say it
18. martha and the muffins - monotone
19. david bowie - let's dance
20. blancmange - livin on the ceiling
21. the b-52s - lava
22. the magnetic fields - i don't believe you
23. wu tang clan - gravel pit
24. tom tom club - wordy rappinghood
25. the cure - friday i'm in love
26. why - fatalist palmistry
27. the only ones - another girl, another planet
28. the longpigs - she said
29. the strokes - 12:51
30. pixies - head on
31. bratmobile - gimme brains
32. the smiths - the queen is dead
33. the kills - future starts slow
34. belle and sebastian - you're just a baby
35. the velvet underground - i can't stand it
36. jonathan richman - government centre
37. fleetwood mac - go your own way
38. otis redding - love man
39. the charlemaignes - eternally
40. charlie feathers - bottle to the baby
41. joyce green - black cadillac
42. blondie - hanging on the telephone
43. hall and oates - maneater
44. whitney houston - i wanna dance with somebody
45. yeah yeah yeahs - heads will roll
46. sparks - tips for teens
47. neutral milk hotel - holland 1945
48. kiyoshiro imawano - remember you
49. bruce springsteen - dancing in the dark
50. the replacements - i will dare
51. abba - lay all your love on me
52. ike and tina turner - nutbush city limits
53. the sonics - psycho
54. dexy's midnight runners - breaking down the walls of heartache
55. the style council - walls come tumbing down
56. the blenders - don't fuck around with love

GFF 2012: Three Sides to Every Story

here's a wee piece i wrote about the dreileben trilogy, screening today and tomorrow at the glasgow film festival. voila.

In 2006, filmmakers Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhausler sent each other a series of frank emails analysing German cinema’s “completely atrophied discourse,” missives that were subsequently published in film journal Revolver. As well as proving intellectually provocative, their tête-à-tête(-à-tête) planted the seeds of an ambitious collaboration: a trio of films jointly conceived but independently produced. The directors proposed “three stories, three films, from three authors who share a place, a crime, and a time” – a set of separate, yet discursive works, in which the filmmakers "wave from film to film, each as if on a ship moving away from the others."

Dreileben’s core story involves an escaped criminal and an ensuing investigation, but each prepares its ingredients differently. Petzold’s Beats Being Dead is an unorthodox romance; Graf’s Don’t Follow Me Around takes the more expected police procedural track; while Hochhausler’s One Minute of Darkness switches focus from pursuer to pursued, as the fugitive takes shelter in the town’s surrounding countryside. As three individual but intimately connected tales, Dreileben is a relatively unorthodox viewing experience - though not a wholly unique one. The component films of Lucas Belvaux’s Trilogy, for instance, similarly shared the same cast and characters, while only a fortnight ago, rising stars Jessica Chastain and Joel Edgerton agreed to star in Ned Benson’s dual-film love story The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, which will purportedly split its narrative into ‘his’ and ‘hers’ viewpoints.

Dreileben differs from these examples, however, in its promise to present not only multiple character perspectives, but multiple directorial voices. That it originated on German television is suggestive of a multi-director precursor from closer to home: Channel 4’s Red Riding trilogy, which played in cinemas outside the UK. After squeezing David Peace’s source novels into three screenplays, Julian Jarrold, James Marsh and Anand Tucker filmed a segment each, with overlaps and cross-references building into a richly-textured whole. Another (partially) domestic example is the Advance Party project, a conceptual trilogy of Danish/Scottish co-productions that also uses shared characters in wildly divergent ways (Andrea Arnold’s Red Road and Morag McKinnon’s Donkeys still await their final piece).

Each of these examples challenges conventional cinematic parameters, presenting alternatives influenced in part by television’s serial structures, but with potential further parallels to, for instance, franchises filmed back-to-back. But such boundary-testing isn’t without its drawbacks: with all three Dreileben instalments screening in quick succession, you might want to bring a cushion.