Easy Listening (2005, 4.2MB, 1:56 min.)
At once a performance and performance-documentation, this video
grew out of the admission that much of Marisa Olson
Category Archives: performance
Gabriel Shalom – Beardbox
Beardbox (2009, 24.8MB, 2:44 min)
We’ve featured work by Gabriel Shalom here before.
Deft, witty and involving it was then & so it is here too.
Shalom is also public spirited and has just started up this
interesting looking blog for ‘Both theoretical & practical dialogue
about the future of the cinema’.
This combination of some serious thinking with high level technical chops
promises more of interest in the future -we’ll be watching.
For the moment, more here.
A Series of Practical Performances In The Wilderness (3)
moose and atv (2005, 2MB, 46 sec.)
springwater finale (2005, 6.5MB, 2:27 min.)
Final two pieces, chapters 7 & 8, from
Spike Jonze –Weapon of Choice
Weapon of Choice (2001, 37.1MB, 3:52 min)
Great Spike Jonze directed video for Fat Boy Slim’s
Weapon of Choice, featuring Christopher Walken.
ICP Orchestra Play Monk
Criss Cross (2003, 95MB, 7:42 min.)
The extraordinary ICP orchestra put Monk’s Criss Cross
through its paces.
All good, but just wait for the Misha Mengelberg piano solo.
Piano players everywhere: weep. Everyone else just relish.
Bliss.
Helmut Oehring – BlauWaldDorf
Blau Wald Dorf ( Blue Wood Village) (excerpt) (2001, 1.7MB, 53 secs)
The music of Helmut Oehring is like nothing you’ve ever heard.
A hearing child of deaf mute parents, he incorporates his early
experiences into the music he writes, which frequently features
sign language ( not in a token but a completely necessary and
integrated manner).
The actual sound world of the music, moreover, is suffused with a character that
must surely have been formed by those same early experiences -stringed instruments
are tuned down to points of almost unplayable slackness & there is a fragmentary and
distanced, almost walled-off, quality to it all.
If you’re intrigued by the clip it’s well worth checking out recordings of his stuff.
Kate Maki – We are Gone
We Are Gone (2008, 55.8MB, 2:50 min)
I was drawn to this because of its connection with the
sublime Howe Gelb ( he produced & plays on the album & it’s on
his OW-OM label), but it’s winning beyond that very good intial reason.
Ms Maki’s song & performance are quite lovely in their passionate restraint
& the video, directed by Scott Cudmore & shot by Lee Towndrow on,
I gather, though I’ve lost the link to the page that told me so, the ‘video’
setting of a stills cam, matches the song in passion, restraint & loveliness.
Cudmore and Towndrow pass, with flying colours, a very simple test
-anyone who can’t produce something affecting with the most minimal
of technical resources probably shouldn’t be making movies at all…
KontraKontrolle – by Roel Wouters and Luna Maurer
KontraKontrolle (2003, 8MB, 3:13 min.)
Performance during the Visual Power Show, Paradiso Amsterdam, October 2003
by Poly-Xelor (collaboration between Roel Wouters and Luna Maurer).
“KontraKontrolle is a performance concept where we literally stepped into the
computer-screen. By placing ourselves as icons (via bluescreen technique) on
top of the presenters screen we could interact live with the presenter’s actions.”
Curt Cloninger – Pop Mantra #3
Pop Mantra #3 (2008, 103MB, 9:53 min.)
The third in a series of performances where Curt Cloninger continuously
performs a short excerpt from a single pop song for several hours,
blindfolded.
At OTO in Brooklyn, New York.
Excerpt: “tonight / wait, now” from The Ramones song “I Just Wanna Have Something To Do”
Duration: 6 Hours
Media: Electric Guitar, Voice, Black Felt Blindfold, Black Converse All Stars, Time
Read more here.
Doomtree – Drumsticks
Drumsticks (2008, 32.1MB, 2:43 min)
I know no more about Doomtree than you can glean, gentle viewer, from their site
& their my space but this video simply fills me with joy.
First off, nothing with massed bicycles in it can be all bad but, over & above,
it’s something to do with the combination of skillz & almost palpable & somehow
innocent sincerity that just makes a beeline for my heart. Lovely.