TODAY IS BORING presents an interpretive evening of film,
minus its original audio, accompanied by improvised live music and sounds.
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Admission £4 advance / £6 on the door
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CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI
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Max Renn runs an unauthorized cable channel in Toronto that caters to viewers demanding increasingly violent and pornographic material. One night, in search of new programming fodder, he stumbles across a scrambled satellite transmission emanating from unknown regions -- a startlingly graphic broadcast that routinely depicts the brutal torture and murder of women. Excited by his find, Renn attempts to track the show to its origins, but he continually encounters resistance, including a warning from one of his programming suppliers that the broadcasts are not dramatizations but depictions of actual murders. Undaunted, Renn finally traces the show to Pittsburgh, where he encounters the transmissions of a Messianic madman known as Brian O'Blivion. Although O'Blivion is dead, his daughter continues to spread his twisted gospel by broadcasting old videotapes of his sermons, encouraging people to embrace the barbarous new TV world as reality. Eventually Renn finds the man who is controlling all the hallucinatory video violence. But by then, Max has begun his own descent into madness, an insanity culminating in physical manifestations of the exploitative sleaze he has profited from over the years. ( David Cronenberg | Canada | 107 mins | 1983) TRAILER
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OUR PERSONNEL FOR THE EVENING ARE AS FOLLOWS:
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'Post-punk electronic balladeers' Cult With No Name, comprise the East London duo of Erik Stein and Jon Boux. Having been the first international signing to LA label Trakwerx in 2007 (founded by Jackson Del Rey of Californian punk legends Savage Republic), CWNN's two studio albums to date - 'Paper Wraps Rock' and 'Careful What You Wish For' - have been met with considerable critical acclaim. Leading music journalist Mick Mercer proclaimed the band his discovery of 2007 (with both albums sitting in his annual top ten lists), Blaine L. Reininger of genre transcending legends Tuxedomoon collaborated on their second album, Don Letts spun tracks on BBC6, and more recently Brett Anderson asked CWNN to open for him for the launch of his new album. Having provided the music for two blacker than black comedies at the Edinburgh Festival ('Moz and the Meal' and 'Bored Stiff'), it’s fitting that Cult With No Name have now turned their attention to cinema for their first DVD release, 'Lightwerx: The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari'. Cult With No Name’s compulsive and compelling soundtrack extends their ability to instantly create evocative moods over 51 breathtaking minutes, on a journey that takes in warm ambience, nerve-shredding distortion, electronica, and vast, futurist soundscapes.
Copies of the DVD will be available for sale on the night, at an 'exclusive-to-the-event' price of £4.
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TODAY IS BORING brings you a new themed film night which couples a live freeform audio score from various performers, giving us all the chance to see and hear a completely new experience. We hope there will be many more to come. The films you see may or may not be familiar to you, and will not be restricted to silent films, as is often the case with standard 'film with live music' excursions. Our intentions are to remove the primary source of direction and literal meaning from the experience of a film, its original sound, and give the visuals a completely different context, exploring a range of feelings and atmospheres, not necessarily limited to conventional 'music' per se.
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Propaganda by another name:
17 Pygmies: The Outlaw J.D. Ray
Trakwerx Records
The stylistic turn from 17 Pygmies' last full-length, 2008's instrumental space-rock opus Celestina, to its latest, an eleven-song collection of post-civil war folk-blues settings titled The Outlaw J.D. Ray, is about as extreme a change as could possibly be imagined. The difference is so great, few if any would guess they're from the same creators. In both cases, the group wholly inhabits the persona of the genre-associated outfit to such a degree that any ‘real' identity below the surface disappears. In short, there's no moment where the mask drops or the curtain's lifted, no ironic gestures to acknowledge the conceit, no hint of tongue-in-cheek tomfoolery (as might be found in The Residents). It's hardly the first time the group has shifted focus. In 2007, 17 Pygmies issued Ballade of Tristram's Last Harping, a self-described stab at “retro ‘60s Psychedelic-‘70s Classic Rock” (also designed as a tribute to the Art Nouveau movement) and has produced scores to classic silent films such as Battleship Potemkin and Nosferatu. The band's been around so long (since 1982), it's presumably long ceased to let its artistic direction be overly determined by trends or sales figures.
On the new album, harmonicas wheeze, and banjos, acoustic guitars, and mandolins strum in songs typically set in lilting 3/4 waltz time and with Jackson Del Rey (aka Philip Drucker) and Meg Maryatt acting as vocal raconteurs (a washboard even surfaces during “Atlas Shrugged Blues”). It's a concept album once again, with this time the story centering on a man wrongly accused of murder who flees his farm and family rather than rot in jail for the rest of his days. Of the two vocalists, Maryatt's singing is the more appealing, with her pure voice and harmonies helping render the songs “I'll See You In Heaven,” “Captured In Amber,” “She's Gone,” and “I Know My Train's A-Comin'” memorable. Even if the music stylistically speaking isn't one's cup of tea (I'll confess early American country-folk music isn't what I normally gravitate towards), one nevertheless comes away applauding the band's wholesale commitment to the project and to presenting the material with an imagination and attention to detail other artists would do well to emulate. The cardboard covers, aged paper stock, period typographic design, and tinted photography (there are even diary records written by the titular protagonist) collectively attest to a level of dedication to the project that can't help but admire.
May 2010
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