Time for my review of the ICA, I guess
Well it was fairly well attended, mostly by a bunch of slightly dubious black-clad freaks who are far too old to be going to pop gigs. Some of them were even on the stage!
TINY COLOUR MOVIES -
Well, I don't want my review of this to be a big grumble, but certain aspects of it did bring out the Victor Meldrews in me.
I guess, I suppose, that most people in that hall were ultimately there because, when they were teenagers, they liked "synthpop" - i.e. some guys singing pop songs played on synths. Tiny Colour Movies is not this, it is a load of largely beatless, wholly instrumental, abstract noodlings accompanying an hour or so of found fragments of bits of grotty film trims, home movies and super 8mm junk ... which just happens to have been done by some guy who used to make synthpop records we liked when we were teenagers.
I dunno about you, but I don't go to many other shows of largely beatless, wholly instrumental, abstract musical noodlings accompanying an hour or so of found fragments of bits of grotty film trims, home movies and super 8mm junk (are there any?? ;0) , so in a way this whole thing is a bit of a quaint indulgence for me.
Some points of practicality: I saw John do TCM in Brighton's Duke of York cinema last year. In a comfy seat, with a good view of a big screen.
At the ICA, I had to stand for an hour, craning my neck up at a modestly-sized screen, which (like all people under 6 foot standing in a crowd) I could only see the top 80% or so of, due to Other Tall People's Heads being in the way. By the end, my legs were tired and my neck ached. Conclusion: standing cinema sucks.
Also: the sounds was loud, with a very good quality full bandwidth PA... unfortunately, the ICA building had other ideas, and when fed extreme frequencies at that volume, it had a tendency to resonate rather irritatingly. At one point, there were even some rather psychoacoustically disorientating interference tones kicking off. The result was that some of the music, which was doubtless meant to be serene and stately, was actually rather physically assaultive. John himself fretted a couple of times afterwards that "I hope your ears are still alright"! Solution: TURN IT DOWN, GUYS! DUH!
Another Meldrewism I find with Tiny Colour Movies is what I dub "Mac User Syndrome" (probably most unfair as doubtless some PC users suffer from it to
)
By this I mean a slightly pretentious prattling about certainly arty subjects, blitheringly oblivious to the technical and practical realities of what is actually happening. (Standing cimema and assaultive serenity may already be examples of this, actually). But the main example of this Mac User Syndrome tonight is that, for all the blabber and gush about the "lusciousness" of old analogue film, it's grain and flicker and hairs, etc etc, what we see on the screen for much of the evening has involves a lot of:
- DIGITAL noise speckle from the projector
- DIGITAL MPEG compression artefacting (those unmistakeable blocky squibbling patterns)
- DIGITAL jaggyness around curves and edges, due to the limited line resolution.
I mean, of course, all the analogue imperfections are still there underneath... but I just find it bit daft to hear to much blether lauding them and no mention at all of all the equally visible digital artefacting laid on top. Do Mac Users genuinely not notice these things? ;-)
ANYWAYS...... so, once more, John got to live out his childhood fantasy of being the cinema organist at the Chorley Odeon
He noodles away industriously at the side of the stage, under an indigo light, as the Tiny Colour Movies play. I couldn't honestly for the life of me tell what was on the backing track and what John was adding, but I didn't really seem to matter.
The movies themselves are sometimes intriguing, sometimes poignant, sometimes amusing, sometimes just "meh?". They're all preceded with some caption cards of introduction. (Minor gripe: another thing certain Mac Users need to understand is how to use a possessive apostrophe, and the difference between a hyphen and an m-dash ;-)
Many of these captions elicit chuckles from the audience, as they describe the rather unusual antics of the amateur film makers whose fragments we are viewing.
To be perfectly honest, at times I am unable to tell whether some of this footage is real, or part of some elaborate post-modern joke. The intros often read like dry little skits out of JG Ballard's "The Atrocity Exhibition". Has John actually just made half of this stuff up? Has he in fact shot some of it himself? Numerous continuity errors creep in - for instance, the shadow photos of New York are supposedly shot by a bank clerk on his way to work every morning... so what, he went to work by HELICOPTER?!? :rolleyes: (i.e. there is plenty of the footage clearly shot from the air).
Ultimately, does the authenticity of these images really matter? I don't suppose it does. It's a collage of junk, constantly hitting your retinas with scraps of the visual iconography of the 20th century, which invites you to make up your own narrative... perhaps John has already made up some of his own narratives about where these films came from... or perhaps every last word is true... that kinda misses the point, as most of the pleasure in what John wants this new art form to be is simply to be sifting through this cultural detritus and letting it tweak at your emotions. I guess it's kinda similar to the way you experience the world when you're very young (under 5 years old) and haven't hardly a clue what half the stuff you're seeing is all about.
From the musical point of view: a lot of John's soundtrack is very serene and ethereal - but it's also very pristine and electronically clean. Perhaps it's another Mac User Thing ;0) but I'd have thought someone who euologizes about the beauty of analogue imperfections in old film media would have twigged that the exact same thing applies to the audio medium too when he does the soundtrack!! No adding a bit of hiss and grain into his audio too? Frankly those big synthetic string swathes with their perfect treble rendered all the way up to 20kHz sound a bit too bright and brittle for the intended purpose in my view - if it was me, I'd bung them down on tape, reduce the bandwidth, roll off the top end, merge it into his, muffle it all with spring reverb...
The KURFURSDENAMM (or however you spell it
piece is a little oasis in the soundtrack in that it has a drum machine in it. I like it a lot - very simple instrunental synthi stuff: TOO simple, you're not meant to be allowed to make a tune like that in 2006, you had to be Jean-Michel Jarre in 19
76. But John has done it anyway, it's a wee gem. The chugging bass synth pulse of "Looped Los Angeles", John doing that thing where you put an echo on something and play against it as an off beat, is nice too.
So: Tiny Colour Movies there, marvellous. By turns intriguing, inscrutable, amusing, eerie, and quite possibly entirely made up. Although a comfy chair and turning the volume down would've made it a lot more enjoyable!
