Joyful Noise

Among recent additions to the superb UBU web archive I found this 60 minute documentary on Sun Ra (1914-1993). For anyone unfamiliar with Ra this is a great introduction. Apart from the amazing music, virtuosic playing, and outlandish costumes, what makes him so interesting a subject is his theoretical sophistication and originality. Director Robert Mugges gives Ra time to introduce and expound both the afro-futurist ‘mythocracy’ underpinning his work and the more concrete, everyday philosophy of discipline and precision instilled in the Arkestra’s musicians.

Anempathetic film music

Last week I saw Eisenstein's Strike (1924) screened at Toronto's Gladstone Hotel as part of Early Monthly Segments' celebration of Worker's month. Given the global age of austerity we are now entering the choice couldn't of been more apposite. The film was accompanied by a live score performed by Canadian composer and experiemental muscian Allison Cameron. Cameron used a range of different instruments and sound making machines – guitar, thumb piano, effects pedal, record player, wireless radio – to create a sparse and abstract sound world - isolated notes pierced unevenly textured sheets of radio static and a broken record skipped relentlessly, its pops and crackles repeating in a rhythmical pattern that partially masked the original orchestral content. This foreboding mechanical monotony, which drove the piece forward, was accentuated by something beyond Cameron’s control - the basso continuo for the entire work was the film projector's whir. Its light, flitting drone underscored the haunted feeling evoked by the music.

The music didn’t take on the scene’s rhythms or express its emotional core. There were accidental points of convergence where sound met vision; moments where that heard could conceivably have been the sound of events seen. But for the most part the score was, in Michel Chion's term, anemapathetic, meaning it proceeded, like the broken record and vintage projector, ineluctably, undaunted and almost oblivious to the film’s unfolding narrative. There’s a dramatic scene early on in the picture: a factory machinist is wrongly accused of stealing a company micrometre. The cost of replacing the lost tool, which management cruely demands, stands to financially ruin him. His shame in unfairly shouldering this accusation and his frustration and anger at not being believed were almost unbearably intense emotions to share. This unusually ferocious intensity was, I would argue, the result of Cameron’s skilful positioning of the scene against a backdrop of profound sonic indifference. This is for me where the power of her score lay – it made you feel more strongly.

I.T on Film Music

The excellent Nina Power turns her attention to film soundtracks:

Increasingly film music seeks to lend humanity itself a veneer of the cinematic, an eco-friendly soundtrack to dampen the fears of the antagonisms and asymmetries of everyday existence. Coupled with the painful loudness of Dolby surround sound and the brutal atonality of sounds of cinematic violence - explosions, car crashes, gun shots - the modern cinematic ear is trained for nothing less than the sickening, yet omnipresent, combination of cruelty and fake humanism that characterises contemporary life.

Glad she mentioned Shutter Island as an exception to the general 'Revenge of the Visual'. At times while watching the film I felt that the sounds were more significant and divulging than the images. Generally the music choice displays similar paternalism and philanthropy to the Golden Age of British public broadcasting discussed in this essential Quietus review.