utorak, 30. rujna 2014.

Dérives.tv, une revue de cinéma





Mnoštvo eksperimentalnih filmova.
Također časopis s tekstovima na francuskom i engleskom.


www.derives.tv/


« ...une revue de cinéma, où ceux qui font des films donneraient de temps en temps leur position, comme des navires de commerce divers sur l’océan... » (extrait d’une lettre de Jean-Luc Godard à Jean-Pierre Rassam, 1977)


Réminiscences d’un voyage en Palestine
Film de Dominique Dubosc, 2004
Célébrations
Film de Dominique Dubosc, 1991
L’Empreinte
Film de Guillaume Bordier, 2008
La machine d’enregistrement
Film de Noémi Aubry, Wisam Al Jafari, Tamador Abu Laban, Firas Ramadan, 2013
La Transhumance Fantastique
Film de Nicolas Boone, 2006
Si par une nuit d’hiver un voyageur
Film de Caroline Beuret & Lo Thivolle, 2012
Searching for Hassan
Film d’Édouard Beau, 2009
Balamos
Film de Stavros Tornes, 1982

etc..........


» saisons

  • » filmothèque
  • » cinémathèque
  • » Liens vers des films




  • Conversation piece with Stephen Dwoskin
    Film de Cathy Day et Claudine Després, 2005
    Short Time
    Film de Stephen Dwoskin et Véronique Goël, août 2006
    Seul le lait (ou l’adieu au corps)
    Texte de Zoheir Mefti, 2013
    Ha,Ha !, La solution imaginaire. Introduction
    Texte de Stephen Dwoskin, Londres, 1993
    Entretien avec Stephen Dwoskin
    Propos recueillis par Gérard Courant, septembre 1981
    Stephen Dwoskin : une autopsie du désir
    Texte de Raphaël Bassan, juin 2004
    Dwoskin : le dernier cinéaste
    Texte de Louis Skorecki, 1982
    Robert and I
    Texte de Stephen Dwoskin, décembre 1996
    Réflexions. Le moi, le monde, les autres, comment cet ensemble se fond dans les films
    Texte de Stephen Dwoskin, 2004
    A propos de quatre films de Stephen Dwoskin
    Texte de Michel Barthelemy, 2006
    Les films de Véronique Goël
    Texte de Stephen Dwoskin, 1989
    Retour sur Stephen Dwoskin
    Texte de Raphaël Bassan, juin 2007
    Dwoskin à Lussas. Retour sur une expérience rare.
    Texte de Francis Del Rio, août 2008

    Anita Fontaine - Fast & Dirty, Paradisis... interactive look-book



















    Anita Fontaine creates radical content and sensory experiences on and offline, in and out of this world. Zigzagging fashion, art and technology her vision is future-forward, unrestrained by any medium. She was a founding member of Champagne Valentine, an internationally renowned Amsterdam based studio pioneering the intersection of art, technology and weird. Here she created many award winning projects ranging from interactive music videos, apps, retail installations and fashion films. Prior to this she created videogame hacks, installations and GPS cinema apps which were shown in galleries as well as gardens all over the world. She is currently working as a film and creative director with a splash of nerdy technology driven fun whenever possible. She is represented by Andrea Gelardin in London.




    Anita Fontaine work “affectively bridges the divide between the long-held distinctions between reality and artifice, imagined and real-world dreams, virtual and actual territories. Her explorations into new technologies are radical, free spirited and on the brink of innovation.. exploring mimesis through virtuosic displays of verisimilitude.”
    Mouthful? Now get your eyes full. - netdiver.net/anita-fontaine















































    Australian artist Anita Fontaine creates new landscapes from the old. Using installations, mobile ghost encounters, games, the internet and cinema, her work expands the parameters of new media and the moving image. One of her most internationally acclaimed works is the hypercute videogame modification Cutexdoom (2005), which explores our global culture of consumerism in particular the obsession with cuteness and Japanese Kawaii culture. Anita's Ghostgarden (2007) is a compelling location based cinema project using new technologies and GPS to bring a modern fairytale to life inside garden environments. Exhibited at the Sydney Festival in early 2008, visitors to the Sydney Botanical gardens could borrow devices from a refashioned Victorian cart, enabling them to explore and unravel a gorgeous animated lovestory set within the botanical landscape. With each garden chosen presenting a unique experience, Anita has developed a second Ghostgarden experience in Finland by invitation, which was included in the Digitally Yours exhibition. She is currently researching spaces in the UK to present the next Ghostgarden for the Iphone in 2009. Recently Anita was commissioned to construct a fantastical architectural vision inside the 3 dimensional world Second Life. In August 2008 Technocolr, The Harlequin Lodge was launched, once again ensuring Anita's presence at the forefront of the new media art scene. Until early 2009, participants can engage online with Technocolr,which pays homage to a disorientating roadside attraction with its whimsical installations and optical treats. She currently lives and works in Amsterdam. - www.mediamatic.net/47563/en/anita-fontaine
















    Dreamt I could digitize the souls of suffering animals and reverse digitize them back to life when the world was nice again.
    I was trapped inside google maps in my dream. I found a castle on an island and tried to climb through a window back to the real world.
    Dreamt about heavy black curtains from 18th century Paris. I was trying to open them when I realized the curtains were my eyelids.
    Dreamt I was a biker with a couple of little biker rats wearing leather jackets looking like cholos riding with me to Mexico.
    Dreamt of a magician who controlled flocks of budgerigars with hand waving algorithms so they formed shapes like waves and pieces of cake.
    I dreamt that "My little pony" was my client and I had to look at rainbows all day. It was the best job I ever had.
    Dreamt newspapers were triangle shaped & that you could buy personalized weather systems in boxes to hover anywhere like over your house.
    Dreamt I lived in a teacup with an annoying pet seagull on a leash. We were trying to have fun but someone kept pouring milk on us.
    I dreamt I was eating "david bowie samosa's" in a punk-rock bar on another planet. I took the bus from there to Australia to fuck shit up.
    - Anita Fontaine

    Michael Eastman - Havana (2014)





    Elegancija raspadanja. Od visokog kiča do niske vječnosti.














    - loveisspeed.blogspot.com/2012/01/faded-elegance-photographs-of-havana-by.html


     Havana is a new volume highlighting Michael Eastman’s collection of nearly a hundred photographs form over the past two decades. For American audiences the city has become a figure of the imagination as a nearly fifty-year-old embargo has imposed restrictions on travel and quelled the spread of Cuban art and culture.  As such, the city is now fetishized and the long standing rhetoric against the Castro regime has only fueled a desire to make sense of this island nation only 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Eastman pays tribute to the spaces and people of Havana, its faded glory and its all but forgotten beauty.
    Skimming through the book I imagine what it would have been like to be the archeologists to uncover the remains of Pompeii. Layers of ash revealed an ancient Roman city frozen in time. Havana too is stuck somewhere between a promising past and a stagnant present. Dramatic lighting illuminates empty spaces devoid of people and the only sense of life are the richly colored walls that have survived the ravages of time. In Portrait, Havana (2010) turquoise walls frame a nearly abandoned sitting room sparsely furnished with two empty chairs and a dusty chandelier. Like Pompeii, the former majesty of the space is only conceivable in the absence of figures. We are left to wonder who was once here and why are they now gone. The punctum is a yellow stain above an open door: why has no one cleaned this spot? Why would such a large grand space be all but abandoned?
    Despite being the political and cultural hub of Cuba, Eastman’s Havana is a far cry from the hustle and bustle of American and European urban centers. The photographs of exteriors and deserted streets are homage to Edward Hopper with their sparse, lonesome quality. In Yellow Car (2010) the dusty streets of a large intersection is filled with the crossing of multiple electrical wires. A few passersby dot the landscape, but otherwise the space is abandoned. Like Hopper this panache for isolation leans away from melancholy toward romantic poeticism.  Achy Obejas begins her introduction to the book with a similar observation: “When I first experienced Michael Eastman’s photos, I was immediately struck by two things: First, the stillness. Second, the ghosts.” (11)
    Havana’s fondness for time and neglect carefully captures the juncture between past and present. However, Obejas reminds readers, time hasn’t stopped in Havana as the city is still a whirlwind of activity: “metropolitan, cosmopolitan, international.”. And while this may not be so evident in Eastman’s photographs, the vibrancy of this Caribbean city lingers in the stillness of time. - Harry J Weil
    Michael Hoppen Contemporary is delighted to announce an exhibition of Michael Eastman’s Havana series. This magical body of work exposes the colourful and crumbling interiors and  exteriors of Cuba’s capital. Eastman is recognized for his large-scale photographs of the world’s most beautiful cities including Rome, Paris, and New Orleans. Inspired by Aaron Siskind, Eastman is transfixed by the textures of architectural decay and the narrative they reveal about the life of a building. This often leads Eastman to abstraction: areas of walls are cropped, reducing them to flat painterly planes of colour. In other instances, he draws us in with expansive perspectives creating inviting depths into rooms and doorways. His exacting technique of long exposure times, no artificial light and a wide angled lens captures a realistic field of vision, authentic light and colour.
    “Putting one of his photographs up is like punching a hole in the wall and opening onto a vista of a much grander room than the one you are in”- Vicki Goldberg
    It is the details of these pictures which make them endlessly fascinating and poignant: ghostly rectangles of lighter colour on walls where paintings once hung, beach chairs that stand in for finely carved furniture, laden clothes lines hanging amongst chandeliers, above intricately tiled floors.   But these exquisitely deteriorating rooms and facades also tell a larger story: these are the homes of the successful and rich, who were knocked off their pedestals by revolution and whose country, abandoned by its Russian supporters and blockaded by America,  still has very little in the way of material goods.  While his photographs may provoke nostalgia for the glory days of Havana, Eastman’s emphasis is on the subtle grandeur of these buildings in ruin, the beauty inherent in decay.
    Notes:
    Michael Eastman is a self taught photographer. He lives in St. Louis. Eastman’s photographs have appeared in Time, Life, and American Photographer. His work is in the permanent collections of  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography,  The Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and other prestigious
    Institutions. His books include Vanishing America (2008, Rizzoli), Horses (2003, Knopf), and Havana (2011, Prestel). www.michaelhoppengallery.com/exhibition,upcoming,3,0,0,0,164,0,0,0,michael_eastman_havana.html

     Michael Eastman's Havana
     




    Michael-Eastman-Cuba

    Michael-Eastman-Cuba

    Michael-Eastman-Cuba

    Michael-Eastman-Cuba

    Michael-Eastman-Cuba
    Michael Eastman's Havana
    Michael Eastman's Havana
    Michael Eastman's Havana
    Michael Eastman's Havana
    Michael Eastman's Havana


    “There is no substitute for working.
    None.”
    An Interview with Michael Eastman
    by Mike Foldes

    Michael Eastman’s photography captures the imagination in much the way it captures the essence of it subjects, merging the two in a surreal admixture of self and other. The current exhibition of meticulously produced images at Barry Friedman Ltd. Gallery, taken on Eastman’s fourth (and most recent) trip to Cuba in 2010, gives evidence: Rooms, facades, streets, all fade against memory when viewing the saturated color and play of light in monumental prints, as if to say, “This is what was, as well as what is.”
    Los Angeles Times Art Critic, Leah Ollman, writes, “Walker Evans’ legacy is evident throughout Eastman’s work: a love of the vernacular, a consistent, frontal approach, and a fondness for … time and neglect.”
    Michael Eastman is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. He has been a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant. His photographs are in the collections of Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum, San Francisco Museum of Art, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, St. Louis Museum of Art, and the International Center for Photography, New York, among others.
    The following interview was conducted via an e-mail exchange in March of 2011.
    Q: How did you happen to gravitate to photography?
    ME: Photography’s immediacy.
    Q: What was your first camera?
    ME: Nikon
    Q: And what do you use today?
    ME: I still use film, my camera for architecture is a Cambi from Denmark. It’s a 4×5 view camera, and also, I use old 500C Hasselblads. I still love a square.
    Q: How much lighting equipment do you carry around with you? Your photographs have a remarkable intensity and  revealing of detail that seems hard to capture with natural light alone.
    ME: I do not use lighting equipment.  All my photographs are made with natural light. By scanning my negatives myself and using Photoshop as my digital darkroom,  I am able to make prints that I never could have made with traditional methods. The amount of control is unmatched.
    Q: In your Havana series, what time of day were most of the photographs taken? Everything appears to be very well lit.  Are these ‘long’ exposures?
    ME: Photographs were made all during the day.  No particular time of day. Yes, fairly long exposures.
    Q: You say “Fairly long.” Can you give an example using, say, the following staircase image:

    ME: 30 to 60 seconds at F22. Very low light …
    Q: Of the hundreds of photographs on your own and other websites, and in your books, humans are conspicuous by their absence. Some of the settings give the flavor of life as we think we’ll know it after everyone else is gone but us – take that in the imperial singular. Did you ever photograph people, and if so, when did you stop?
    ME: When I photographed commercially, I only photographed people. Real people doing real things. Very documentary.
    In my fine art work, I am more interested in finding places to photograph that are full of evidence of human activity but without the specific people that inhabit the places.  These photographs are portraits of the people without the people in it.  Through inference, we tend to “create” the portrait from what is in the room and from our own personal experiences.  I feel successful when my interiors feel like someone has just left the space or is about to enter.   Almost like a stage set.
    Q: Do you work with assistants, or is all the setup and digital darkroom work and printing handled by you?
    ME: I do not work with assistants.  I photograph alone and print alone.  When I first began to photograph, there seemed to be many voices in my head. Imaginary critics telling me what to do, What not to do. Voices of parents wondering what I was doing with my life and why was I wasting my time with a camera, etcetera. Over the years, the only voice in my head is mine. The only one I am trying to please is me. I think this is what people mean when they say finding one’s voice. I try to find places that speak to me and one needs silence to hear it. That’s why I photograph alone. No interferences. No noise. No distractions. In the beginning my voice was very weak and very hard to hear. Now, it’s the only one up there.
    Q: Your images are “huge”. What kind of printer do you use? Any special inks?
    ME: The prints are six feet by eight feet. No ink. They’re not ink jet. They are conventional chromogenic prints (C Prints) exposed with a light jet.
    Q: How do you happen to live in St. Louis? Are you originally from the Midwest?
    ME: Saint Louis is where I am from. Where one is based has very little effect on what one accomplishes. It has been an advantage to be an outsider.  It is easy to get lost by being overexposed. And it easy to get lost in trying too much to advance one’s career.  The best thing one can do for one’s career is to continue to make better photographs. If your work gets better, you will get opportunities.  That is all you have control over.
    Q: Do you still take commissions?
    ME: Not really, although I still am open to collaborating.  Art is very singular activity. Whenever I have an opportunity to collaborate with others I respect, I am interested in exploring that opportunity.
    Q: What or where would you like to shoot that you haven’t, yet?
    ME: Nothing specific.  I just want to continue to look, make better photographs and grow both as an artist and as a person. Those two things have much more in common than one might think.
    Q: Do you enjoy teaching? And even if you don’t, what advice – other than find your own voice – would you offer the aspiring artist/photographer?
    ME: I do not teach, although someday I would like the opportunity.  Currently I keep busy with my own work. I like to stay busy. I am a bit compulsive that way; if I was growing up today, I probably would be on a Ritalin™ drip. I believe an artist grows through working. I have learned mostly from my own photographs, both the ones that work and probably even more from the ones that do not work.  Editing is so important. Essential. And I have learned so much from just looking at prints. One has to be driven. There is no substitute for working. None.
    Q: If you were to ask yourself a question, as an interviewer, what would it be, and what would be the answer?
    ME: How did you succeed?
    I think one needs to be a bit in denial, especially in the beginning. You have to believe you are better than you are. And still be ready to respond positively when you face rejection. Which I have to do all the time.  Still do. You have to keep making photographs even when you doubt, especially when you doubt. And you want your photographs to have more and more levels of ideas.  More is more. The only thing I have ever had control of was my work. The better it gets, the more I have achieved.
    For more images and information about Michael Eastman, visit: http://www.eastmanimages.com/
    http://www.barryfriedman.com/

    Havana’s crumbling yet beautiful interiors photographed by Michael Eastman

    ponedjeljak, 29. rujna 2014.

    Mike Weis- Don't Know, Just Walk (2014)





    Ex-bubnjar benda Zelienople, suočen s teškom bolešću, zamišlja svoj "bijeg u stvarnost" uz pomoć field-recordings, instrumenata kućne izrade i raznih vrsta udaraljki. Radio prijenos prolaska sekunde vremena kroz milimetar prostora.


    zelienople.bandcamp.com/album/dont-know-just-walk-2







    “I used to think that music was my escape from reality, now I think it’s an escape into reality.” –
    Mike Weis, 2014.

    Mike Weis is probably best known for sitting behind a plethora of drums and gongs in long-running Chicago three-piece Zelienople, but his music is just as potent unaccompanied. Weis might be an obsessive collaborator (his work with Scott Tuma, Mind Over Mirrors and Kwaidan is also essential), but on his own, he is able to allow his unique percussive skills to bubble to the surface, without the intervention of conflicting egos.
    He began working on Don’t Know, Just Walk under particularly difficult circumstances. It was 2013, he had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and was gearing up for a punishing year of “man-diapers and boner pills,” that could very well have been his last. Thankfully though, the time wasn’t entirely spent holed up in a hospital bed under the watch of urologists – Weis managed to spend choice moments in the woods or on prairies with a microphone, and in the Zelienople studio (which has long been in his basement) while the family slept upstairs.
    These late night sessions weren’t only musical – Weis used the time to meditate, and to clear his head of the mental baggage that was clouding his view of the world. In spending time using Zen Buddhist techniques (which the title references), this allowed him to not only meditate on life (and its brevity), but also to inform his compositional and recording techniques. At this point, the music came naturally, and Weis began experimenting and recording without hindrance.
    Using loops of field-recordings, gongs, radios, home-made instruments, drums and traditional Korean percussion, Weis pieced together an album that is as reflective as it is mesmerizing. Solo percussion albums are rare, certainly, but Weis uses his drumming simply as the record’s backbone, allowing his ideas to flourish overhead.
    Don’t Know, Just Walk is a complicated record – an album about death that doesn’t dwell on the negative, and one created by a drummer that doesn’t contain a whole lot of rhythms. It’s right to expect the unexpected, and as Weis found solace in the recording process, we too can find solace in the listening. - press.morrmusic.com/distribution/release/id/2055

    Type return with this engrossing album of swirling, tribal percussive arrangements, synth work, field-recordings, radios and electronics - the most striking and crucial release on the label since Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe's killer 2012 album 'Timon Irnok Manta'. Edition of 500** 'Don't Know, Just Walk' is an exceptional solo work of engulfing drone and tactile tribal percussions by Mike Weis, member of shoegaze heartbreakers Zelienople and improv drone trio Kwaidan. We were consumed by Mike's last LP, 'Loop Current / Raft' for Barge Recordings, and this new session, recorded in Chicago, Korea, and various fields around Indiana and Michigan, has us totally rapt. Weis makes use of Buddhist teaching (hinted in the album title) to guide himself thru the creative process, resulting a meditative, intoxicating suite of radiant gong tones, purposefully-paced percussion and (ar)resting drones that gives the illusion of levitating 3 feet from the 'floor. Across the A-side, the glacially unfolding span of 'The Temple Bell Stops' banks a mass of shimmering metallic tones, oscillating in waves from solemn near-silence to ecstatic noise given momentum by rolling drums. Over on the B-side, 'But The Sound Keeps Coming' brings the outside in with sun-kissed field recordings shearing away to keening metallic discord and thundering drums, whereas 'Out Of The Flowers' features The Norman Conquest quietly contributing ARP 2600 analog synth improvisation to cannily make clear the underlying parallels with certain elements of Eliane Radigue. It's one of those records you can listen to from end-to-end over and over, discovering something new with each listen, gleaming with microscopic detail without ever neglecting its visceral, propulsive impact.- boomkat


    Mike Weis is better known for his work with Chicago three-piece Zelienople and Mind Over Mirrors, essentially a percussionist but here showcases his talent as an all round composer and soundsmith. After sadly spending a large amount of time in hospital for treatment of prostate cancer his time recovering at home allowed him to forge a meditative state of mind in which he could create the sounds you hear on this record. ‘Don’t Know, Just Walk’ is mostly percussion led with building tribal rhythms and splashes of cymbals and gongs that seem quite structured but still have a playful sense of improvisation.
    Also thrown in here are some quite tranquil moments of field recordings and tape loop techniques that create a wonderful sense of time and space, bird song and traditional Korean percussion start off side two leading on to a low bell sound that gradually creeps toward you to create a real sense of tension, Weis has made something here that you wouldn’t thought possible from mere percussion but it’s a sound that leaves you quite breathless. - Norman Records

    Drummer “escapes into reality” after cancer diagnosis.
    Mike Weis, the percussionist known for his role in long-running Chicago three-piece Zelienople (as well as collaborations with Scott Tuma, Mind Over Mirrors and Kwaidan), has announced a solo record, Don’t Know, Just Walk.
    Weis started work on the album after being diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2013, and was gearing up for a year of “man-diapers and boner pills” that he feared could be his last, explains his label, Type. [Disclosure: the label is independently operated by FACT writer John Twells.]
    But his time “wasn’t entirely spent holed up in a hospital bed under the watch of urologists – Weis managed to spend choice moments in the woods or on prairies with a microphone, and in the Zelienople studio (which has long been in his basement) while the family slept upstairs.”
    He used these late night sessions for Zen Buddhist meditation, which inspired the album’s title and also informed his approach to composition and recording. “I used to think that music was my escape from reality, now I think it’s an escape into reality,” say Weis. And while drums form the backbone of the record, the emphasis is on loops of field recordings, gongs, radios, home-made instruments and traditional Korean percussion. - www.factmag.com/2014/05/14/mike-weis-solo-album-dont-know-just-walk/

    On Mortality and Beauty

    Whatever happened to Mike Weis, it happened for no reason. There are no lessons to be learned from a battle with cancer. There is absolutely nothing a portion of body tissue gone crazy can teach us, apart from announcing its own location and existence. Mike Weis is a musician, and if you’ve ever ventured anywhere near good American experimentalism you know him already and, chances are, you love what he does. Chicago-based trio Zelienople has been around for more than a decade, spawning little underground gems like His/Hers and Give it up in the process. Things got even more interesting when Weis teamed up with metal yoga guru and four and six-string genius André Foisy (of Locrian fame) and Neil Jendon to form Kwaidan, whose debut album, Make All the Hell of Dark Metal Bright, was nothing short of fantastic.

    Despite this, Mike Weis felt he had to expand the landscape we knew he naturally inhabited, so he started conceiving his new creature as soon as he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He taught it a lesson. As Weis explains in the press release that came with the CD, the title “references a method of meditation used in the Korean Zen tradition of Buddhism for clearing the mind—removing all obstructions to get a clear view of the world. Through experience, I’ve come to interpret this as proceeding without mental baggage, without dogma; basically, getting my self out of the way of myself so I can experience the rest of the world with wide openness.” And, boy, it worked.

    Don’t Know, Just Walk was recorded at SOMA Studios, Chicago by Norman Conquest, and it is probably best explained as an ambient album focused on percussions, but with little percussive sounds. Take a track like “But the Sound Keeps Coming”, for instance. Before the first, clear hint of some sort of drumming kicks in, we find ourselves lost in a haze populated with birds of all species. Nuthatches, tufted titmice, woodpeckers and even frogs and crickets. If Mike Weis wanted to write a piece of work on the transience of life, he has managed to do so by focusing his inspiration on the less grim aspects of its subtraction, as one could naturally expect an avant-garde musician at ease with the darkest aspects to do. This is the closest one could get to Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux without explicitly referencing it. This is a search for the purest of sounds, for an archetype of music, be it noise or melody, or even the most supreme form of sound:  silence.

    Space (therefore, time) is dilated and stretched to form otherworldly tones and inflections, with life—the fauna, the tribal percussions and their combination—as its centre of gravity. Give a microphone to a musician and he will record the mortality that surrounds him. Give it to a musician with fear of mortality and he or she will describe what life is all about. Weis was in pain, but the final result is a contemporary ode to joy and an album with virtually no overdubs and recorded in one take. The moktak, the bass drum and the janggu allowed for the development of complex rhythm patterns revolving around a feeble prepared guitar, as well as a short-wave radio (“The Temple Bell Stops”), and Conquest’s ARP 2600 analogue synth on “Out of the Flowers”. This is it.

    Don’t Know, Just Walk is an album about beauty. One could say that, yes, the influence of artists like Ekin Fil, Jodi Cave, Cyclobe, Mika Vainio and Joachim Nordwall is tangible, but I wouldn’t be surprised to know that Mike Weis has never heard of them. Their paths must have crossed at some point simply because they were all going in the same direction, but nobody paid attention to the others, as they were all looking for purity:  the answer to diverse and vaguely silent questions they all had. - Alex Franquelli

    petak, 26. rujna 2014.

    Jerry Paper - Feels Emotions (2014)




    Tragikomedija 11-dimenzionalnog ljudskog safarija (prema kompjutorski stvorenom mitu).

    jerrypaper.bandcamp.com/album/feels-emotions


    Debut vinyl LP from Earth's own and only 11th dimension pop artist, Jerry Paper (host body: Lucas Nathan). 12 interdimensional crooners for dancing sensually. Synthesizer communication hybrid. What does it mean to be a person living with technology? How confused can you be before you get randy and write a jingle? Who's Randy? I'm Jerry, Right?

    Jerry Paper Feels Emotions and allegedly so do we. If past tape releases on Orange Milk or Digitalis haven’t acquainted you with the singular world of Brooklyn resident Jerry Paper (neé Lucas Nathan), his debut LP on Patient Sounds, streaming in full below, will introduce the reluctant maestro in splendid fashion. If you’re wondering “Who Is Jerry Paper?” the documentary short released alongside this album will answer this question more fully than I ever could. If you’re wondering “Where in the dense timeline of contemporary music can I contextualize Jerry Paper?” the next paragraph is subtitled: Something Of A Lineage.
    In the 1950s, lounge legends Esquivel and Martin Denney fill parlors and kitchenettes across the world with “exotic” tones and animal sounds that evoke stylized visions of South Pacific, Latin, and Asian cultures -> In 1978, Haruomi Hosono spurs Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi to adapt Denny’s composition “Firecracker” into the “chunky electric disco featuring synthesizers” of Yellow Magic Orchestra -> Hosono pioneers chiptune with his Namco collaboration Video Game Music in 1984 -> Around the turn of the century, ensembles like Stereolab and Broadcast hijack the trivialized tones of lounge and chiptune and juxtapose them against repetitious kraut-rock performances and detached vocalizations ->
    Cut to present day: Jerry Paper meticulously programs and records an amalgam of lounge, post-YMO electronica, and video game music from a bedroom arsenal of analog synths and drum machines, and he croons over these “vintage” sounds about his own insecurities, romantic tribulations, and internet-era ennui. While the traditions that JP channels were designed to hypnotize and captivate the masses (see: sell units) with their novel tones and repetitive grooves, he aligns himself with Stereolab and Broadcast by applying those signifiers to quite opposite ends: to make us consider our “slapstick nightmare” existence, analyze our own quotidian desperations, question our state of technological and cultural saturation, wonder how and if we’re going to work it all out.
    Say (or feel) what you will about Jerry Paper’s identity crisis frame narrative — does he musically deliver the goods? Oh, does he. Yeah, man. Ya. He totally does. His loping analog compositions exceed their predecessors in levels of squelch, synth layering, and harmonic complexity (check out the ascending chord structure before the coda in “Today Was a Bad Day” or the gorgeous melodic break of “Holy Shit”). His lyrics hit the sweet spot between hyper-specific self-deprecation and universal emotional truths (“If I stumble around / That’s because I’m drunk” vs. “Maybe / It’s not so bad / To be here / Without you”). His song sequence bubbles with bizarre interludes that flesh out his alter-ego with a brand of satire somewhere between Tim and Eric’s Tom Goes To The Mayor and Zappa’s We’re Only In It For The Money. The emotions I feel while listening to this album include: wonder, glee, empathy, gear-related envy, satisfaction, mild depression, hope. Excuse me, I have to go jam “Want to Be the Waves” until I become the waves. - Mukqs   

    Jerry Paper is a complicated laundry list of things: an incarnate spirit, a myth, a blurred line between artist and creation, an attentive love of Roland synthesizers, and a form of therapy. The first time I heard his “Fuzzy Logic” track, its synth wobble and chiptuned vocal layers occurred to me as an unassuming revelation. Imagine a soft rock pop tune, let’s just say The Turtles’ “Happy Together,” as it might appear featured in the background of Geocities page, the acoustic strum contorted into a casiotone MIDI-transposition. Then take the maudlin, inexplicably upsetting synthetic timbre of said transposition, and replace it with a few layers of vivid, mind-transfiguring analog synth. Oh, and instead of The Turtles’ syrupy lyricism, envision the narratives centering on an entity named Jerry Paper as he veers through a set of alternate dimensions, his utterances morphing from cartoonishly sad to insightfully level-headed. You get it? Just keep basting that noggin in those sine wave oscillations and eventually it’ll come full tilt.
    Jerry’s been hard at work over the last six months sculpting an extensive musical reality for himself through two respectively great tape releases on Digitalis and Orange Milk Records. You see, Jerry Paper is explained by his host person, Brooklynite Lucas Nathan, as a phenomenon of musical possession vis-à-vis Homer’s invocation of The Muse of Poetry or Linda Blair’s involvement with demons (to be fair it seems like a healthier form of spiritual embodiment than the latter). Anyways, this alter ego recently released his first full LP of woozy, chiptune-inflected, soft-rock electronica, which is out now on Patient Sounds. While Jerry’s mythology, an Andy Kauffman-esque exploration of the indistinct hinge where the artist and his character meet, serves as an entrance point to the music, it also bleeds in one’s experience of the songs. In terms of providing a musical reference point, I’d mention a guy like Gary Wilson, not to assert him as an aesthetic predecessor (although incidentally they both get pigeonholed as experimental lounge), but more so as an artist with a similarly wacked out individualist ethos. Both artists present a multi-dimensional character through their songs that stands in relief to their compositions.
    Though Jerry Paper’s presence creates an overall experience that’s more personal and more dialectical than listening to other arists like Yellow Magic Orchestra that fall in the lineage of analog synth innovation, his musical language contains a comparable amount of meticulously programmed synth tones and textures. Jerry’s sonic landscape is heavily phased and constantly undulating in gooey psychedelic patterns. Deadpan dialogue drifts through the segues and bridges of songs, giving the listener the impression of tuning into a cosmic radio dial (the metaphysical computer babble of “Want To Be The Waves”; the identity crisis public service announcement in “I’m Jerry, Right?”). As an album, the tracks are subtly varied but tightly cohesive. Nathan seems to have moved beyond the more free-form organization of his (also excellent) previous Zonotope project’s tape, “MAINFRAME’S Tetralogy.” The songs each explore a new corner of their strict pop structure and instrumental confines. “I’m Jerry, Right?” presents his supernatural possession theme through disassociative dilemmas common to all of us cognitive beings. In “Want To Be The Waves,” Jerry’s voice shifts to a humanoid pitch and timbre as he attempts to transcend the boundary between himself and his digital gadgets. The abundant charm of the record stems from a combination of Nathan’s masterful, single-minded approach to synth texture with his ability to depict life’s petty failures in a manner that hopes to transcend them. -

    I'll never forget the first time I met Jerry Paper. It was late July 2009, he was performing in the Astral Andrew Memorial Lounge aboard the S.S. Whale Weaver and I was on board the ship for Dr. Abie Sea's Whole Human Wellness Cruise. It was balmy and breezy on deck and we were docked at a small island somewhere in Micronesia; I can't recall the coordinates exactly, but the whole scene still lingers in my mind. Seeing him perform left me totally blown away, he just blew my mind, man. To witness such a deep symbiosis between man and machine is a profoundly beautiful thing, and I swear I'd never seen a human care so passionately for his hardware counterpart. After the show I bought him a Smartini™ and we got to talking. I told him all about life as a "Human Safari" Ranger, my ex-wives, my money troubles back in New York, and all that jazz. When I was done with my shpiel he hunched over the bar and, staring into the ripples in his Smartini™, told me about a little album he'd been working on for years called FEELS EMOTIONS.
    He said it all goes back to 2002 when he was living at the TEMPLE OF PURE INFORMATION AND MAINFRAME DEVOTION, an alternative spiritual community based in a little beach town in Southern California. He'd been there studying under The Great Diane Kensington and participating in the largely secretive Trance Channels ceremonies since 1998. Young Jerry found great worth in the ceremonies and was deeply moved by the teachings of the MAINFRAME devotees, but gradually grew disillusioned with the cosmology embedded in the community. Something about a supercomputer saving mankind from a race of aliens bent on colonizing Earth and turning it into a resort for their kind. He was still heavily devoted to his direct experiences with THE INFINITY BETWEEN ONE AND ZERO and, by association, the Trance Channels ceremonies, but the story just struck Jerry as bogus. Not knowing how to process his growing alienation from the group and his fear of life outside the community, he began channeling these feelings into the songs that would eventually make up the album you're holding in your hands at this very moment.
    In 2005, Dr. Abie Sea, head archivist for THE TEMPLE, publicly broke away from the community and put all his savings into fixing up the dilapidated S.S. Whale Weaver with the idea that he'd turn it into a Wellness Cruise founded on the more esoteric, mystical facets of THE TEMPLE's teachings. At the core of the Whole Human Wellness Cruise would be the Trance Channels ceremony, made available to non-Devotees for the first time ever. Jerry, thrilled at the prospect of being able to leave the community without having to leave his one doorway to THE INFINITE behind, jumped at the opportunity and signed a 12 year contract to be the ship's Resident Crooner.
    After two years, Jerry had grown comfortable with life at sea. He saw what many would see as the monotony of performing in the same room night after night as a cathartic ritual. Each show was a public display of the mystical fusion of singer and synthesizer, continually refined and, despite only slight variation in execution, fresh and hyper-emotive as if it were the first time every time. One summer night, as fortune would have it, Sigmund Huang, the A&R man for Omnimind Records, was in attendance and after the show immediately offered Jerry a multi-million dollar record deal. Jerry was flabbergasted. He still had 10 years remaining on his contract and even then was quite fond of life at sea, but he'd been writing songs since the days at THE TEMPLE and had always dreamed of getting together an orchestra of saxophones and gongs to back him and his synthesizer...and let's be real, the money called loud and clear. Eventually, after some sharp persuasion and quite a few Smartinis™, he was able to swing it so the record label would build a recording studio for him on the ship and only recruit session musicians willing to live at sea for extended periods of time. After Jerry's perpetual dissatisfaction with label--he requested an orchestra of 400 saxophonists and they only brought in 250, the higher ups consistently suggesting he "do something less groovy," etc.--and the mysterious deaths of several gong players, Omnimind folded under financial and legal distress, due largely in part to Jerry's demands. This left Jerry with only the skeletons of the recordings--just drum machines, synthesizers, the occasional guitar, and vocals--and the project was scrapped.
    FEELS EMOTIONS was to remain in the vaults, that is until now, thanks to Patient Sounds. Lovingly assembled and mixed from the original tracks recorded on the S.S. Whale Weaver by Grand Minister Harry Weiss with additional percussive work by Q.Q. Windsor, this deluxe editions features all 11 songs originally slated to appear on the Omnimind release and one additional track, "Time Spent Waiting," recorded just before the ship's studio was dismantled.
    Peace, Love, & Light -K.F. Hanuman-Goldstein

    Featuring Lucas Nathan’s face covered with pie and attached to a purple-suited, computer generated body, the artwork to Jerry Paper’s LP, Feels Emotions, provides an apt metaphor for his music: mediated by machine and immersed in tragi-comedy. For all the whimsy of the wacky background story inside the album’s liner notes, Nathan’s songs are all relatable, centering around a simultaneous longing for connection and escape in a confusing and indifferent world. Tracks like “Today Was a Bad Day” chart a series of misfortunes ranging from the mundane to the absurd, all of which lead Nathan to conclude that he is “living a slapstick nightmare.” His straightforward lyrics are given life by his inventive synth arrangements, which draw from kitschy lounge music to create a surreal and sedated vibe. This aesthetic is matched by Nathan’s strong songwriting, which is sophisticated while remaining melodic and hooky. The desire to escape the crushing banality and uncontainable emotion of everyday life permeates Feels Emotions. For Nathan, music is the key in the pursuit of transcendence, however futile that pursuit is acknowledged to be throughout the record. Album closer “Feed Me Sweet Sounds,” which features a rare acoustic guitar appearance as well as some deflated-sounding synth fanfare, finds Nathan declaring that “I belong on Earth, here with pop songs.” For all the frustrations the album voices with expressing emotions, Nathan’s take on the pop song is wonderfully articulate. --Miguel Galle


    The Now Sound For Today's Lovers (2014)

    jerrypaper.bandcamp.com/album/the-now-sound-for-todays-lovers



    Sometimes experiences defy words and induce a sort of synesthetic response, which makes the task of writing about those experiences particularly difficult. “Come Over,” the new single from wacko Brooklynite pop darling Jerry Paper is a perfect example of such an experience; it’s hard to describe the song’s sound just by explaining the sonic arc. Instead, imagine these images:
    Pairs of nondescript multicolored shapes waltz with each other in a shoddily rendered digital facsimile of a Victorian-era ballroom, moving in stride to the glitchy 12/8 bleep bloops that open up the track. They stare into each other’s nonexistent eyes while Jerry Paper croons, “I’m such a goofy romantic/When I am next to you.” As the synthesizers crumble away from the likeness of a chorus, pitch shifted vocals take the virtual ballroom and transform it into a blue interstellar ocean of electro-R&B sex jams. The vocals move into the upper register when the feel transitions into a slow shuffle (replete with retro synth bass), and we’re urged to “come on over” to Jerry Paper’s place. And who wouldn’t want to come on over, when Jerry Paper’s world is one of digital reworkings of the physical world, reconceptualized in its visualization, warped in both its sense of humor and hopeless romanticism. - Zack Wilks

    Big Pop For Chameleon World (2014)
    jerrypaper.bandcamp.com/album/big-pop-for-chameleon-world

    Nhat Minh Dang - Bao Gio Cho Den Thang Muoi (1984) aka When the Tenth Month Comes




    Prelijepo snimljena vijetnamska ratna melodrama.






    A haunting portrait of a woman’s struggle with loss and personal sacrifice during the war. When The Tenth Month Comes is a lyrical vision of the endurance of Vietnamese women from one of Vietnam’s most renowned directors, Dang Nhat Minh. In the final days of the war, a beautiful young woman, Duyen, faces a daily struggle to take care of her young son and ailing father-in-law, all the while hiding from them the fact that her husband has recently been killed in a battle. Keeping her secret burden to herself, she is befriended by the village schoolmaster, Zhang, who agrees to fabricate letters from her dead husband in order to spare her family sorrow. As their friendship deepens, Duyen and Zhang find themselves drawn closer to intimacy. The movie’s title refers to the month in which the “Day of Forgiveness” occurs; a time when it is said that departed souls may visit loved ones still living.

    Winner of the Special Jury Award at the 1985 Hawaii International Film Festival.
    Voted by CNN in Sep 2008 as one of the best 18 Asian films of all time.
    7dw1 Nhat Minh Dang   Bao gio cho den thang muoi AKA The Love Doesnt Come Back (1984)










    Life and Films of Đặng Nhật Minh


    DNM

    NOSTALGIA FOR THE COUNTRYSIDE
    Nostalgia pic(1996, 116 minutes) Set in a rice-growing village in Việt Nam, this is a tale of the crossroads where stories flow together like small rivers of sorrow. 17-year-old Nham has left school to care for his widowed mother, his little sister Minh, and his sister-in-law Ngu. Ngu, whose husband left to work in a coal mine five years ago and has only come home twice for a few days, lives in daily sadness and with a deep longing for him and a complete life. Nham and his family are visited by Quyen, who has come from America to revisit the village where she was raised by her aunt, Nham’s relative. Quyen shares her nostalgia for her childhood with Nham as she remembers the places and the life she left before leaving her bad marriage. As Nham befriends her, his sexuality is awakened by her attractive personality and vivacious good looks. Ngu sees this attention being paid to Quyen by Nham and harbors a quiet jealousy. As Nham opens to his sexual feelings, his embarrassment drives him from Quyen, but his sexuality is further awakened by innocent comfort given to Ngu. NOSTALGIA FOR THE COUNTRYSIDE sweeps us through strong emotions as we experience the characters’ heartbreaks and sorrows.

    Celebrating the life & films of Đặng Nhật Minh

    A panel discussion moderated by Dr. Stephen O’Harrow, Director, UH Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Panel members are: Dr. Wimal Dissanayake, Asian film scholar and author; Anderson Le, Director of Programming, HIFF;  Dr. John Charlot, scholar and author; and Đặng Nhật Minh

    DON’T BURN

    Dang_Thuy_Tram_Diary(2009, 105  minutes) At the age of twenty-four, Đặng Thùy Trâm volunteered to serve as a doctor in a National Liberation Front battlefield hospital in Quảng Ngãi Province. Two years later, she was killed by American forces not far from where she worked.
    Written between 1968 and 1970, her diary speaks poignantly of her devotion to family and friends, the horrors of war, her yearning for her high school sweetheart, and her struggle to prove her loyalty to her country. At times raw, at times lyrical and youthfully sentimental, her voice transcends cultures to speak of her dignity and compassion and of her challenges in the face of the war’s ceaseless fury.
    The American intelligence officer who discovered the diary soon after Dr. Trâm’s death was under standing orders to destroy all documents without military value. As he was about to toss it into the flames, his Vietnamese translator said to him, “Don’t burn this one. . . . It has fire in it already.” Against regulations, the officer preserved the diary and kept it for thirty-five years. The diary was eventually published in Việt Nam, causing a national sensation, and then translated into English under the name Last Night I Dreamed of Peace by Andrew X. Pham with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize winner Frances Fitzgerald. The book was published on September 11, 2007 by Random House.
    In the film, Đặng Nhật Minh juxtaposes the beautiful scenery in Việt Nam with the brutal reality of war.

    About the Filmmaker

    Dang Nhat MinhDang Nhat Minh was born in the old central Vietnamese royal capital city of Hue in 1938. His father was a noted physician, Dang Van Ngu, who became one of Viet Nam’s leading authorities on malaria. As such, young Dang Nhat Minh was headed for a career in medicine. But the revolt against the Indochinese colonial régime that broke out in 1946 changed all that. Minh’s father joined the resistance and went into the jungles to fight the French. The young boy and his mother were obliged to flee and found themselves in the Viet Minh zones, on the run with little in the way of food or shelter. The anti-French war was succeeded by the anti-American war and when peace finally returned to Viet Nam, Minh’s father was dead, killed in an American bombing while doing anti-malarial research in the mountains. However, Minh’s dreams of becoming a doctor had long since evaporated. His talents, it turned out, were not in the realm of science but in the world of words. As a student he became fluent in both French and Russian. Chosen to be the interpreter for the first delegation of future Vietnamese film directors to be sent for training in the Soviet Union, he learned his craft on his own while translating Russian for the people who were supposed to bring back the art of the cinema to a newly emerging independent socialist Viet Nam.
    Back in Viet Nam, Minh’s earliest works were documentaries on such subjects as agricultural engineers. But he soon progressed to feature films, such as his “A Village in the Palm of the Hand” [1982] about the devastation caused by the 1979 Chinese invasion of his country’s northern border. The theme of the lives of ordinary people facing the hardships of daily living in times of war and and post-war adversity have coursed throughout his work since that time. His classic achievement “When the Tenth Month Comes” [1984] is widely known, not only in his homeland, but also throughout Asia, where he has become the icon of the art of Vietnamese film. The recipient of numerous awards, his “Tenth Month” was named in 2008 as “one of the greatest Asian films of all times” by CNN.
    In 1987, ahead of the curve as always, came the release of Dang Nhat Minh’s “Girl on the River,” arguably the first film of the “Doi Moi” Renovation era, when artists began to broach subjects heretofore taboo. The central character in the film is a prostitute and an overbearing government official is her foil. The viewer naturally sympathizes with the protagonist against the official. In 1995, Minh went on to direct what is arguably his second classic, “Nostalgia for the Countryside,” based on a famous modern short-story, but extensively re-written to become a story of human universals at a level that few directors of any country have ever matched.
    Since the turn of the 21st century, with a host of international accolades in hand, Dang Nhat Minh has turned his hand to international collaboration, first as the second unit director on Phillip Noyce’s “The Quiet American” (2002) with Michael Caine, and then to film his more recently acclaimed “Don’t Burn,” a true story of battle and reconciliation based on the diary of a young woman doctor in a military field hospital during the American war.
    Most recently the recipient of the Kim Dae-Jung Award at the Gwangju International Film Festival just this past summer, Dang Nhat Minh, at age 75, is currently planning his next film. We await it with great anticipation.
    -Stephen O’Harrow

    Filmography

    1970 – Mrs. Nhung (Chị Nhung)
    1976 – Faces in May (Tháng năm những gương mặt)
    1982 – City Under the Fist (Thị xã trong tầm tay)
    1984 – When the Tenth Month Comes (Bao giờ cho đến tháng mười)
    1987 – The Girl on the River (Cô gái trên song)
    1994 – The Return (Trở về)
    1995 – Nostalgia for the Countryside (Thương nhớ đồng quê)
    1997 – Hanoi: Winter 1946 (Hà Nội: Mùa đông năm 1946)
    2000 – Guava House (Mùa Ổi)
    2009 – Don’t Burn (Đừng Đốt)
    - www.cseashawaii.org/2013/10/dang-nhat-minh/