This is a guest post by writer and musician Dave Madden. Take it, Dave:

What lingers in the closets of the Brass Ring of recent film composers? James Horner scored Robert Conrad’s kinda-crappy cult classic The Lady in Red. James Newton Howard did session work for Ringo and arranged songs for Olivia Newton-John.  And then you have Ennio Morricone whose wardrobe contains enough oddity to match the awards on his mantle.

During the mid ‘60s, while Morricone was securing his role as the Spaghetti Western king via Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy, he became a member of Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza, a revolving collective of musicians dedicated to “anti-musical systems and noise techniques” (note: he was part of the band even throughout his days with Dario Argento and his first academy award nomination for the 1979 Days of Heaven). 

GDIDNC loosely labeled their technique “Instant Composition”, as everything went direct to tape, not staff paper. They merged a collage of the previous 50 years – Webern-like serialistic pointillism, free jazz, spectralism, Musique concrète – with extra-musical philosophies and disciplines; not to be confused with aleatoricism, they crafted their works not by emptying their preconceptions to get to zero, but incorporating myriad ideas and exercises to guide themselves to zero. While that reads as par for the course for improvising musicians today, there are a few things that separate them from your average non-musician – and placed the crew in the flagship ranks of AMM and Musica Elettronica Viva, and turned them into idols for a young John Zorn (he wrote the liner notes to their 2006 box set, Azioni) . 

First, each of the tenuous group was a fantastic musician, respected sound artist and/or scientist: a friend and collaborator of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono (who, together, established the Experimental Studio of the Polish Radio in Warsaw), Gruppo founder and pianist Franco Evangelisti was involved with the Studio of Experimental Electroacoustics of UNESCO, focusing on the biophysics of brain impulses as sonic vibrations; Mario Bertoncini (percussion, piano) made his living as a music educator and, for decades, a concert pianist; Roland Kayn’s (Hammond organ, vibraphone, marimba) “monumental graphic scores” for orchestra were performed by Pierre Boulez, though he later devoted his life to “Cybernetic Music”, a sonic renewing process that became the focus of his ten-hour long Scanning. And so on with all eighteen-and-counting purported contributors.

More importantly, as former Down Beat editor Art Lange points out, they were all known for their compositional savvy:

The key words here, however, are “composers” and “organized.” Evangelisti insisted on a performing ensemble that consisted solely of composers in part because of the inherent (even if intuitive) sense of formal logic they would bring to the performance, but also to avoid any taint of instrumental virtuosity for its own sake.

Lastly, when they performed, the disparate personalities combined into a single, flailing behemoth that did not understand the concept of “lull” or “wandering” as it pursued its artistic objective. 

Observe part of “Strings Quartet”:

 
Wait for the percussive bombast near 7:20

 
Morricone after the jump…

Angus MacLise (top left) with Sterling Morrison (top right), John Cale (front left) and Lou Reed (in keffiyeh) on Ludlow Street in 1965. One of the earliest known pictures of the Velvet Underground.

What looks to be a fascinating exhibit devoted to the life work of poet and musician Angus MacLise, opens tonight at the Boo-Hooray gallery space in Manhattan.

A bit of an avant garde Zelig, MacLise, who died in Nepal in 1979, is perhaps best remembered as the original drummer—well, tabla and bongos, really—for the Velvet Underground before Maureen Tucker joined the group in 1965. A fiercely bohemian type, MacLise quit the Velvets on the eve of their first paying gig, insisting that they’d “sold out.” No recordings of MacLise actually playing with the group have ever been officially released, although a version of “Venus in Furs” filmed for TV is included in the Caught Between the Twisted Stars Velvet Underground bootleg boxset.

In the late 90s, however, several CDs of MacLise’s home-recordings of his own distinctive drone/percussion music, and pre-VU early 60s collaborations with La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music (along with John Cale, Tony Conrad, Marian Zazeela and on occasion Terry Riley) were made available. They are quite extraordinary and difficult to categorize (somewhere between minimalism and the Residents’ Third Reich and Roll by way of world music). Ira Cohen’s film Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda has also been released on DVD and features a soundtrack from MacLise. This too, is absolutely worth seeking out and a new, strictly limited edition DVD, will be on sale via Boo-Hooray. (Ira Cohen died last week in New York).

Putting a show together from the ephemera of a life lived so far outside of the margins cannot have been easy. .In fact if it wasn’t for a suitcase of over 100 hours of Angus MacLise’s recordings, artwork, publications and manuscripts that was left with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela over 30 years ago by his widow, Hettie MacLise, this show might not be occurring at all. The co-curator (along with Will Cameron) of the exhibit, noted pop culture historian and enthusiast Johan Kugelberg, told the New York Times, “When it rains, it pours. I believe that the stuff decides when it wants to be found.” Mr. Kugelberg has also referred to Angus MacLise as “the American Henri Michaux.”

From the New York Times:

But over the last decade a handful of musicians and historians have been exhuming tape after tape, document after document, to resuscitate MacLise’s reputation as a key participant in the underground culture of New York in the ’60s. The latest of these finds might be MacLise’s Rosetta Stone: a suitcase stuffed with his poems, drawings, photographs and other ephemera, lent to Mr. Young by MacLise’s widow, Hetty, and left in Mr. Young’s basement for decades.

The contents of the suitcase form the core of “Dreamweapon: The Art and Life of Angus MacLise (1938-1979),” which opens on Tuesday at the Boo-Hooray gallery in Chelsea. The show’s curators, Will Swofford Cameron and Johan Kugelberg, contend that it further bolsters MacLise’s status as a “human link document” connecting Beat poetry, the art scenes of Fluxus and Andy Warhol’s Factory, psychedelic film, rock and the classical avant-garde.

“This provides a completely different history of the ’60s and ’70s than we’re used to,” Mr. Cameron said.

Some of the pieces in “Dreamweapon” make a case for MacLise’s significance by association: a flier for an eight-hour happening in 1965 with Warhol, Burroughs, Ginsberg, the Fugs; a handwritten note to his friend Ira Cohen, the filmmaker who died last week at 76.

Others trace MacLise’s brand of mystical eccentricity through various artistic movements. Dead Language Press, which MacLise founded in Paris in 1958 with his high school friend Piero Heliczer, published early work by the Beat poet Gregory Corso and the filmmaker Jack Smith, as well as MacLise’s pamphlet “Year,” from about 1960, which lays out an alternative calendar, with new names for every day (“day of the smoking plain,” “diedricsday”); Mr. Young and Marian Zazeela, his wife and collaborator, still use it.

MacLise spent most of the 1970s in Nepal, where he printed his poetry in tiny editions and drew in a fantastical calligraphy of his own creation that resembles Arabic or Sanskrit. Mr. Kugelberg brushes aside the question of whether the symbols are a form of language. “It’s an inner poetry,” he said, likening MacLise’s process to the subconscious “automatic writing” of the Surrealists.

But if MacLise himself comes across as a cipher, a character to be interpreted through scraps of writing or in a few jarring photographs — like one taken near the end of his life, in which a Grim Reaper figure creeps toward him — it’s no accident. His friends and colleagues remember him as inhabiting some distant poetic plane and as being full of creative inspiration but also unknowably remote.

He might show up for band rehearsal or might not. If he did, he might begin playing before anyone else arrived and continue long after everybody had put their instruments down. Like plenty of others at the time he took copious amounts of drugs, but he seemed particularly neglectful of his own health. His death, at 41, was caused by hypoglycemia, exacerbated by years of drug use, his family said. (The cause has also been reported as malnutrition.)

DREAMWEAPON at Boo-Hooray, May 10th to May 29th, Opening Party: Tuesday, May 10th, 6pm - 9pm

Curated by: Johan Kugelberg and Will Swofford Cameron

Read more of The Velvet Unknown, Now Emerging (The New York Times)
 

 

 
Thank you Jeff Newelt!

 
For a brief period in the late 1940s, Salvador Dali and Walt Disney Studios collaborated on some animation projects, one of which, “Destino,” actually got made. Performance artist Paul McCarthy, known for spinning Disney into nightmares, ventures into the realm of the comically absurd in The Painter (1995). Satirizing William de Kooning, the abstract impressionists, and artists in general. The Painter (1995) mimics, in its lo-tech way, the outrages of Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou with a deranged Mouseketeers on brown acid vibe. In his own weird, transgressive, way, McCarthy takes up where Dali and Disney left off, drawing from pop culture, the high and the low, and tossing them into the Cuisinart of his feverish and fertile imagination. Imagine Snow White and Pinocchio starring in a collaboration between Takashi Miike and Pee Wee Herman.

The Painter (1995) is a brilliant interrogation of the senility and late paintings of Willem de Kooning, complete with collectors and dealers puppet-mastering around him. It’s a video deploying, as so many of his videos do, the mise-en-scène of instructional television (from the Galloping Gourmet to Martha Stewart), but one in which the painter mumbles and cries: ‘You can’t do it anymore you can’t do it anymore.’ And later: ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ He means painting, he means art-making, he may mean life. At the end of The Painter the artist gets up on a table, pulls down his pants and a collector with a protuberant fake nose sniffs at his bare arse, McCarthy’s own.”

 
Here’s The Painter in all of its visceral glory, where art is more than an extension of consciousness, it’s an extension of the lower gastrointestinal tract. 
 

 
Dangerous Minds pal Rod Stanley, the editor of the mighty Dazed and Confused magazine, and photographer Chris Saunders recently made a trip to Nigeria and returned with a short film about the country’s vibrant musical scene:

At the end of last year, Dazed travelled to Lagos, Nigeria, for the third annual MTV Africa Music Awards, an event that had drawn performers from all over the continent, as well as a few international names such as Chuck D, Eve and Rick Ross. The real stars for me on this trip though were all the African performers that we spoke to, photographed and partied with while we were there – people like Uganda’s party boys Radio & Weasel, Nigeria’s first lady of R&B Sasha, Angola’s colourful kuduro crew Cabo Snoop, and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s fashion-mad Fally Ipupa.

Many of them told stories of how a lack of a royalty system and widespread music piracy are hampering the development of their music industry, and how they see themselves as a pioneers laying the groundwork for the generation that will follow them. This short film introduces all of the above and more, with some of their music videos and the insanely hectic atmosphere of the city of Lagos itself.

Photo gallery at Dazed Digital.
 

 
A wonderful discovery from the archives of Mills College For Women, long a hotbed of revolutionary musical experimentation. This early 50’s newsreel of Harry Partch conducting the students on his battery of self-invented and built instruments (Partch famously described himself as a composer seduced into carpentry) is entirely too brief. Fortunately, due to the Youtubes, there’s been an explosion of materials on the great man for one and all to discover. I include as a bonus but a few of the lesser viewed examples of his greatness and encourage explorers to seek out recordings of Partch’s utterly unique music.
 

 
Harry Partch Music Studio a short film by Madeline Tourtelot circa late 50’s. (in two parts)

 
Much more after the jump…

 
Another anthologizing of an obscure yet highly worthy of attention animated film maker from our friends at Network Awesome. This time the subject is Estonian director Priit Pärn.
 

To be sure, these are powerful films.  Parn uses a style that’s inspired many other animators, most notably, the Klasky Csupo animation studio, creators of Rugrats and Ahh Real Monsters. Stylistically, it’s sometimes jarring and unnerving; ragged drawings with intense colors and often mind-bending instrumental music, that all serves to create an incredible experience.  There is very little in the way of dialogue, and far less in the way of context; there is no real immediately discernable narrative.  In fact, a cursory viewing of Pärn’s work, might just appear to be a collage of ideas, loosely strung together in the hopes of creating a story.  However, one must dig in deeper to see the true, haunting beauty of Parn’s work.

 
Video playlist:

Hotel E (1992)
Time Out
Breakfast On The Grass (1987)
The Triangle (1982)
a short interview with Priit Pärn
Frank & Wendy (latest film, still being completed)
 

 
In Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, British artist Mark Leckey edits found video footage from the 1970s, 80s and 90s of young people dancing and the result is a pop culture artifact that is archetypal, alchemical, and hypnotic. The video “noise” adds a dreamy electricity to the visuals. From disco to Northern soul and techno, we are set adrift on memories of bliss.
 

 
Jaw-dropping portraits of Kurt Vonnegut and Twiggy made entirely from junk mail by artist Sandhi Schimmel Gold. The Kurt Vonnegut piece is still available for $800.00. From the artist:

My work reflects our society’s obsession with beauty through advertising - and the endless images that bombard us daily. It is a purposeful intermix of images derived from advertising and thousands of incongruent pieces - images and text - from advertising that arrives through my mailbox. Assembled like a mosaic; the paper tiles create an entirely new image - an eclectic and tactile portrait reworked in my imagination, utilizing materials that would otherwise go to waste.

Check out more of Sandhi Schimmel Gold’s mosaic portraits over at her website.

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Found objects: Going gaga over Jason Mecier’s ‘junky’ celebrity portraiture

(via My Modern Met)

 
Heavy meta.

(via Certified Bullshit Technician)

 
Poet, musician, film maker, photographer, publisher, world traveler, spiritual seeker and cosmic New Yorker, Ira Cohen has died at the age of 76

Author of dozens of books of poetry and “The Hashish Cookbook” (under the pseudonym of Panama Rose), Cohen also published the works of his friends William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Paul Bowles, Brion Gysin, Jack Smith Harold Norse and many others.

Cohen made many pilgrimages to India and Kathmandu (where he ended up living for several years) and chronicled his journeys in extraordinary photographs. His travels took him to Morocco, Tunisia, Afghanistan, Spain, Japan…but all roads eventually lead back to New York City’s Lower East Side.

As a film maker, Cohen developed a style distinctly his own by photographing images reflected in Mylar plastic. The Invasion Of Thunderbolt Pagoda and Brain Damage were directed by Cohen in the late 1960s using this mirror effect. The Invasion Of Thunderbolt Pagoda was released in 2006 on DVD by the folks at the late lamented Arthur Magazine. Cohen conjured some of the same cinematic spirits as his peers Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger.
 

Jimi Hendrix photographed by Ira Cohen
 

In certain artistic and literary circles, Mr. Cohen was a touchstone. “Ira was a major figure in the international underground and avant-garde,” Michael Rothenberg, the editor of Big Bridge magazine, an Internet publication, said in an interview. “In order to understand American art and poetry post-World War II, you have to understand Ira Cohen.”

If you spent any time in downtown New York’s art scene during the past five decades you would have undoubtedly crossed paths with the open-hearted and wise gentleman who described himself as a “multi-media shaman.” Ira Cohen stayed relevant throughout his life, never square and never predictable. He was magic. His sphere of influence only grew larger as he grew older. His International reputation as a world class artist and wizard continued to flourish right up to his death on April 26.

Here’s an excerpt of The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda which features a score by the original drummer of the Velvet Underground, Angus MacLise.
 

 
A trailer from a film on Ira Cohen and scenes from his film “Brain Damage” after the jump…