November 30, 2012

Swans, Live in Stockholm


Swans, live in Stockholm, nov 25, 2012. This is Golem music, you can almost hear him/it stomping in the background. The sound of a mobile phone recording cannot possibly reproduce the actual volume these grizzled old guys were playing in. The teeth were rattleing and the inner organs vibrating in pace with the soundwaves. Even though I used ear plugs, after this capture I had to back to a position in the rear of the audience, just to cope. According to wikipedia the front figure Michael Gira used to turn of the air conditioning in the concert room before a Swans performance. About his live shows, he has stated that it is at once 'soul-uplifting and body-destroying'. You get the picture.

November 29, 2012

Rust and Bone by Jacques Audiard

I saw the movie Rust and Bone by french director Jacques Audiard at the Stockholm international film festival. A beautiful love story between a killer whale trainer who looses both her legs in an accident and a adrenaline inflated single father fighting illegal fights for his living. It's beautiful because in my view, both charachters personalities mainly remain unaltered  throughout the movie as they would in real life. The father has his loving sides but can at the same time burst out an hit his child. He seems uncapable of a faithful loving relation, not because he doesn't care, but because he doesn't know what it means. The woman is bitter for loosing her legs and 'looks', but still their lovestory evolves while she becomes the manager taking bets when he fights. Both are very well played by actors Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts. 

When I saw the movie the director was present and a 'Face to Face' interview was made. Among many interesting things he was talking about he described a process where he used two screenplays. The first one was the original one, but the second one was based on several improvisations he and the actors performed before the production started. While shooting the movie he first shot the scene based on the first screenplay and then if they had time, also shot the scene again based on the improvised screenplay. That way he usually has a lot of raw material in the cutting process, he can choose different versions of each scene and by choosing the improvised scenes he adds content that not necessarily attributes in bringing the storyline forward but creates a discrepancy and realism into the movie. 

I found this process interesting and started thinking if I could do something with a similar effect in my work with the Golem game and/or my ceramic art. I like contradictory mixtures of what is expected - unexpected, beautiful - ugly, order - chaos, control - improvisation, skilled - unskilled, normality - abnormality and Audiards second screenplay was an interesting method to achieve some of this in his work. The effect I would like is to add content in my work that might not be part of the original story but adds features that opens up for more complex and partly uncontrolled meanings that can be for the viewer to decide and interpret. This may not be unique, probably most artists strive for this, but it's interesting when reading about practical working methods such as Audiards to achieve this effect.

Below is a clip from the festival with the trailer of the movie and parts of  the 'face to face' interview with Audiard. Second half of the clip is about another great movie I watched during the festival; Sister by Swiss director Ursula Meier.


November 22, 2012

Lana Del Rey - Video games


Lana Del Rei Live on BBC Radio 1 singing the song Video games in a beautifully skewed kind of way. This makes me wonder if is she doing this with purpose, with a total control of the vocals or singing with a tremendous 'feel' or if she's not so good in singing but able to use her limits in a perfect way. No matter what, all of the above alternatives appeals to me, because I like all kinds of skewness making the end result far more interesting than if all the notes were perfectly hit. Or is it just me hearing this? I can't really say I'm musician enough to evaluate the qualities of singing. I can say though that I think the album version of this song don't possess half of the tension that this live version do, so why do music producers vacuumclean this kind of music from errors. The errors can be assets. That's why I like rock'n'roll.