Phonographics, Ruins, Sunburned Hand of the Man, [The User], Acid
Mothers Temple, Philip Jeck, Ira Cohen
Dundee Contemporary Arts
“I feel more at home here than I do in my neighbourhood in New
York,” says sixty-something Beat poet, compulsive namedropper and living
shamanic totem Ira Cohen, introducing a screening of his legendary Angus
Maclise/La Monte Young soundtracked film, The Invasion Of Thunderbolt Pagoda.
Bearing in mind that it’s a Sunday afternoon in Dundee, such a magnanimous
statement, however much it’s designed to flatter, is pretty big cheese indeed.
Taking up residence amid the chi-chi white cube main gallery inside one
of Europe’s sexiest 21st century spaces, this provocatively named three day
festival of sight and sound embraces two specific strands of thought
criss-crossing each other beyond its solely aural/visual interface.
On the one hand, Philip Jeck, [The User] and Phonographics offer more
insular reflections that tiptoe cautiously but utterly, unremittingly focused
through rice paper-strewn memory dreamscapes. On the other, the more
conventionally diffused East meets West psych-rock explosions of Acid Mothers
Temple and Sunburned Hand of the Man crash and flail unfettered into
cacophonies of noise-induced nirvana some might call a trip. In the no-man’s
land at the heart of both, a convergence takes place that, in this context,
makes perfect cosmic, not to say rhapsodic sense.
Philip Jeck’s performance eased and oozed us into the weekend. His usual
array of junkshop turntables conjured a jumbled-up collage of sepia coloured
scratch ’n’ stutter, in which slo-mo East End pub piano tinkles and shards of
backwards raga become as much vintage museum piece installation as generator of
living history.
Taking the acoustic properties of a massive grain silo in Montréal as
its starting point, [The User]’s ‘Silophone’ bats Dundee-generated sounds
betwixt Scotland and Canada via ISDN,only to have them bent out of shape and
morphed into some Chinese whispers-style mutant at either end. Visualised by
pretty splashes of just formed but perfectly regimented blue and yellow, the
space left between each suggests wordless tone poems igniting the landscape.
For their first ever UK appearance, Sunburned Hand of The Man bring home
movies to accompany their freeform freak-outs, and, like good tourists, shoot a
few more for good measure. Entering with a soothsaying wail, their wayward
nouveau jug band clatter instantly veers off down thrilling back road
indulgences, where one of the drummers wraps his kit, then himself, up in red
tape, snares are balanced on heads and the whole shooting match sounds like a
gloriously messy cry after liberation.
Anchoring the chaos is the seismic metronomic thunder of bassist and
Peter Fonda lookalike Rob Thomas, who, in his instrument’s blisteringly
insistent bombast, recalls classic Steve Hanley-era Fall. If SHOTM ultimately
push too hard and peak too soon, it’s nobody’s fault. That’s just how it is.
Thanks to British Airways and a series of road delays en route from
Birmingham, Tatsuya Yoshida’s Ruins very nearly don’t make KYTN’s Sunday
session at all. As it is, bassist Hisashi Sasaki is injured, and the ad hoc
co-opting of assorted Acid Mothers Temple members into the fold lends a
rip-roaring urgency to their truncated one band Japanese New Music Festival,
from the gabbling a cappella of Zubi Zuva X to the amplified manipulations of a
holdall zipper.
Phonographics, featuring Christian Fennesz, Werner Dafeldecker, Martin
Siewert and Burkhard Stangl, finish things on a sublime note, as they perform a
live version of their gorgeous score to Gustav Deutsch’s stunning, multi-screen
Film Ist. While meticulously sourced vintage silent movie footage jump-cuts its
way through modern times, steel guitar and rumbletum laptop twinkles breathe
deep on the fragile, eyes-wide stream of coincidence onscreen. As intimations
of immortality go, it leaves a staggering hush in its wake.
The Wire issue 238, December 2003
ends
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