DNA.
The packaging of this release is really chic, its one of the best presented of all of John’s output, top marks to the designer for the crisp and graphic sensibility, its immediately right for the music, and the idiosyncrasy of retro-futurist design ties together the sharp electro-beat tracks with the other avenues of minimalist and ambient electronica on the album.
When I first got DNA I put off watching the DVD, ever since seeing some of the clips online from the films that made up the DNA exhibition I’ve had this thing about not wanting to be presented with any images in my mind to associate with Johns music, preferring to create my own interpretation (if at all). I’ve gotten over that now, having since become familiar with all of the visual work on the DVD. The first thing that I did do though was to focus on the CD, which had a few new moments of real interest, but unfortunately there were also several moments of indifference on my part to some of what I heard on DNA, and I was left feeling quite disappointed by this release.
But hold on - as I’ve already discovered from watching the DVD for Cathedral Oceans III - context is everything…
To sidetrack for a moment, I’ve never warmed to Tiny Colour Movies, and save for a few tracks I find it a boring experience, that’s not to say I consider it a bad album, it just does not do anything for me, and I’ve always felt that it lacked something – those tiny colour movies of found and re-edited film material perhaps?
As regards the DNA CD, tracks that had immediate appeal were of course the familiar electro of
Flightpath Tegel, and the weaker
Maybe Tomorrow, though its got a nice retro 70’s TV programme theme and feel’s like John has been looking to Ghost Box and sifting through old episodes of Tomorrows World. I’ve never heard Translucence & Drift Music, but the Harold Budd inspired and collaborative tracks of
City Of Mirage and
Over The Mirage felt right up my street, but my initial feelings towards the other tracks were that
Kaiyagura was too sweet and chocolate-boxy, and I expected to like
Violet Bloom but it just washed over me and felt dull.
Phantom Lover had too much of a retro musak gloss which put me off, though there is clearly a distinctive element of Foxxian drama to its sound.
A Secret Life Part 7 was somewhat irritating, and much as I love
A Secret Life 2 (and I appreciate that it was a part of the films from the show) I felt that it was a bit of a cheat including it on the CD, and I really didn’t want to experience it divorced from the ASL album.
In terms of the ‘DNA’ aspect of it all, I surmised that the intention of the tracks on the album was to show some of the avenues of John’s electronica while also exposing the areas of influence on John’s work - or
‘the generic instructions used in the development and functioning of the living organism’ – in terms of the music here then that appears to be Jarre + Budd + Eno = DNA - though this is by no means the complete picture of the Foxx organism, you may as well ask where are the Sacred Music, Beatles, Tangerine Dream, and Kraftwerk elements? But of course we’re familiar with these on Cathedral Oceans, Shifting City, Tiny Colour Movies, The Pleasures Of Electricity, and My Lost City, (and not forgetting the genetic cocktail of 80’s albums, or even of the 70’s). There are a lot of components to the Foxx, and 2010’s DNA is merely a selective slice.
I eventually watched the DVD and astonishingly I enjoyed almost every part of it. For me at least, DNA is not solely about the music, and taken in isolation from the visuals it is possibly like closing your eyes whilst watching a movie. Granted there’s some great movie soundtracks out there, and the CD of DNA will appeal to people regardless of the DVD existing, but whereas the CD left me feeling unmoved, watching the DVD was quite a different matter, and this is where it all made sense, DNA is an audio-visual experience, and it deserves to be appreciated in this way.
The DVD:
Maybe Tomorrow.
This is the least effective visual piece on the DVD. If these images were instead projected onto a backdrop at a music venue then none of that would likely matter, in that situation I’d quite enjoy the buzz of catching the films shapes and colours from out of the corner of my eye, with its computer generated kaleidoscopic forms encouraging parts of my body to attempt to embarrass me to start bopping away to the music. Karborn’s VJ’ing has its place, but here he’s unfairly positioned and is out of sorts up against much of the rest of the work on the DVD, a lot of the other films offer a more thought-inducing experience. If he’d not relied on these flat generic images and had instead gone out and found something real to manipulate in a trippy manner then I might have been swayed to shake my booty at home in front of the screen.
Violet Bloom.
Second time around on hearing this and first time on watching it I actually found the music to be the most progressive electronically of all the tracks from the CD, and I'm intrigued to have more of this. The film with its ‘ghosts in the machine’ approach worked really well with the sparse but potential nature of the music, and much as I generally would not, I liked the Monty Pythonesque bits of cut-out animation near the end. The woman’s face sprouting a flower and adorned with some semi-nude looking people was handled subtly enough so as not to make it seem out of place, and it lent a degree of levity and intrigue to the floating transmitted background.
Flightpath Tegel, and
A Secret Life 2.
Two very different films from Ian Emes, both of which work exceptionally well with the music. The film for Flightpath’ is pure -
‘lock sensors on human, apply Borg nano technology, prepare to be assimilated by cyborg enhancements whilst listening to the sound of the machines in the human enviro containment bay’ - or music and visuals to that effect!
It’s a safe bet to say that we all like a bit of straight-forward electro on this forum, and I sure liked this one.
I mostly loved the film for
A Secret Life 2, but its lovely shots of superimposed environmental textures were a little bit spoiled in places by some (though not all) of the drawn-style animated elements. The cartoon-like man and woman were jarring at times, although the water over the hand and the red sinking man were very effective. Some of the found real-life shots also started to break the spell towards the end of the piece, just what was with that Latino-looking pony-tailed person standing around bemused, what’s all that about Ian? Otherwise, this was quite an inspirational film, the sort of thing that makes you want to get out there with a camera and make your own statement to a Foxx track.
City Of Mirage,
Kaiyagura, and
Over The Mirage.
I liked these three films by Macoto Tezka, and while watching I really felt that having visuals to John’s evocative and lambent style of work was a real treat, these really conveyed the cinematic quality of John’s work and when done well it brings a welcome increase in the degree of atmospheric perspective that’s often at play in the music. Tezka manages to imply a feeling of poetry to his sensitive handling of the images, from
City Of Mirage with its woman ambling giddily along the streets and her scenes intercut with a dancer, to the beautiful scenes in
Kaiyagura of a woman in an animal mask, with close-ups of a shell being held in hand, and of her silhouetted against the windows in a room, all shot in a shifting double-framed effect, its gorgeous stuff. This film for
Kaiyagura gave me a greater appreciation for the music which I never got from listening to it on the CD.
Over The Mirage continued the theme of the solitary female figure, this time within a landscape, and the trio of films felt like they’d been lifted from an imaginary movie that John had once upon a time made and lost. We’ve had The Quiet Man, its time now for The Quiet Woman, no words, just fractured and shifting visuals accompanied by shimmering treated piano.
A Half-Remembered Sentence, and
Clicktrack.
”you can only find this place by drifting, its impossible to walk directly here” – is like a message that could have come from out of Tarkovsky’s Stalker film.
A Half-Remembered Sentence is a great piece of art from Barnbrook with his lovely handling of visual’s, text elements and sound. Its hallucinogenic hyper-re-contextualisation of The Quiet Man prose is so good I’d love for it to have been on the CD.
Clicktrack is of course ‘the’ film for all discerning robots to watch. It’s a defining Metamatic style of identity, graphic and bold, and all cinema, and if ‘John Foxx’ were ever to become ‘James Bond’ then this would be that movie’s title sequence. Instead of Maurice Binders gun barrel sequence with James Bond walking onto screen and dropping down to fire his weapon we would have Barnbrook’s
Clicktrack, beginning with John in silhouette (naturally), walking up to his keyboard and turning around to hit us with a sonic blast, and after this the
‘Invisible Women’ from The Pleasures Of Electricity would appear, here in lieu of those scantily clad dancers that shimmy down the screen in your typical Bond flick...
