After a 3 year wait, artist Max Hattler’s beautiful animation AANAATT is now available on-line. Made in collaboration with musician Jemapur, AANAATT has been described as:
“...a classic in the field of Visual Music, and a unique example of creative ingenuity and elegant design.” - Robert Darroll
“An exciting experiment in the tradition of Oskar Fischinger (Komposition in Blau, 1935), Dwinell Grant (Composition No. 1, 1940) and Slavko Vorkapich (Abstract Experiment in Kodachrome, 1950s).” - Anton Fuxjäger
Hattler’s AANAATT explores:
“A strange world where experience, both familiar and unfamiliar, is cut-up, upside-down and otherwise displaced, as modernist shapes move and construct themselves in almost organic ways. AANAATT, a 2008 music video from artist Max Hattler is a sublime stop-motion animation that hearkens back to 40′s and 50′s abstract films through its geneological exploration of shape and movement with music.” - Jason Sondhi
This is some serious disco history right here! A recording has recently surfaced of DJ Larry Levan mixing live from the 1979 2nd birthday party of the legendary New York night spot the Paradise Garage. The 4 hour set was broadcast live on NY’s WBLS station (hence the occasional MC commentary from the recognisable voice of Frankie Crocker) and was taped off the radio by producer Lenny Fontana as a kid. He had the foresight to transfer the original tapes to DAT in 1990, and to put the mix away into storage.
Recently unearthed by the BBC’s Eddy Gordon, who has described the tapes as “broadcasting gold”, the set was broadcast on BBC Radio 6 as part of a “A Taste Of Paradise” season, which ran over a series of nights and featured interviews with some of the key players in the Garage’s history. Props to the folks at the Irish disco website isodisco.com, who have uploaded all the interviews to their site - these are worth checking out too as they are fun and informative, and have some cracking underground disco soundbeds.
But the main attraction is Levan’s dj set itself. For many people like me, whose number one time travel destination would be the Garage at its late 70s/early 80s peak, this is as close as we’re ever going to get. You can really feel the party atmosphere in the broadcast - which opens with live PAs from Loleatta Holloway, Dan Hartman AND Sylvester, reason enough to be excited - and Larry’s selection is damn near flawless. Sure, the mixing could be tighter, but this is 1979 fer Chrissakes - just check the massive booming bass on some of these tracks! Obviously dub was an influence, as was the Garage’s legendary PA. If you’re not dancing by the time Tribe’s “Koke” kicks in (arf) at 2:49:10 - straight after Candido’s club classic “Jingo” - then you’re most probably dead.
Here’s the set, as hosted on Underground NYC - skip straight to 01:11:00 for the the broadcast to begin, and 01:52:00 for Levan to take over:
Just to make clear, this is NOT the set released on CD by Strut in 2000.
Ok, so this is kind of cheeky and infuriating, but you have to admit it’s also brilliantly executed. The Dewale brothers, aka Radio Soulwax, aka original mash-up masters 2ManyDJs, recently mixed the intros of 500 songs together into one hour long set and called it Introversy. That’s a hell of a lot of song intros - and the mix is accompanied by animation of all the sleeves of all 500 of the tunes coming to life. Now that’s dedication!
Introversy was originally posted on the brothers’ website last month, but as the original was not embedable, here’s a cheeky rip of a ten minute segment that has ended up on YouTube. Yes, the audio and visual quality are not great, but you definitely get the gist, and it’s all the more reason to check out the hour long original which is available to download as a free app on the Radio Soulwax website. Soulwax, their apps and website are all highly recommended - their currently streaming Celestial Voyage Pt 2 mix is a great blend of prog rock and space-disco which also features animated sleeves and is well worth checking out. But for now, here’s a segment from the rather excellent Introversy:
Italian mondo movie maker Gualtiero Jacopetti has died at the age of 91.
Mondo Cane was the movie that started the “mondo” craze back in the Sixties. It was a hugely successful documentary, though some scenes were staged, intended to shock and it did. Although an exploitation film, it was a well-crafted movie that most of its imitators didn’t come close to equaling. While appealing to some of humanities baser instincts, it was also quite critical of the way people treat each other and our planet. It was a shocker with a conscience.
Jacopetti directed several other films, including two that depicted African culture in ways that garnered him some very harsh criticism. Africa Addio (aka Africa Blood And Guts) and Goodbye Uncle Tom depict Africans as either savagely cruel and uncivilized or as victims of white domination and genocide. Billed as exposés about the end of white colonialism and the subsequent civil unrest in Africa, some critics, particularly Roger Ebert who called them “vile crud,” condemned the movies for being racist. But, both films have their champions who see them as denunciations of slavery and white Imperialism. Both sides make compelling arguments for and against the films. DM is offering you the opportunity to make up your own mind by offering the uncut version of Good bye Uncle Tom for your viewing. I think it’s a rather amazing and extreme piece of film making that draws inspiration from Artaud’s theater of cruelty and Bunuelian surrealism with some of Jodorowsky’s dark vaudeville.
Today’s New York Times’ obituary for Jacopetti describes his best known film with succinct accuracy:
Mr. Jacopetti liked to say he had invented the “antidocumentary” or the “shockumentary” with “Mondo Cane,” which was unveiled, and well received, at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. He showed Italian villagers slicing themselves with glass in observance of Good Friday; the French painter Yves Klein using naked women as paintbrushes; and New Yorkers dining on insects in a fancy restaurant.
The narration was droll and the images were ironic: A bereaved mother in New Guinea nurses a suckling pig, immediately followed by the wholesale slaughter of pigs for an orgy of feasting in the same region. Mr. Jacopetti called such transitions “shock cuts.” Another scene shows people mourning in a pet cemetery in Pasadena, Calif. Cut to shots of customers savoring roast dog at a Taiwanese restaurant.
I remember seeing Mondo Cane as a kid and its images were indelible, they linger still. The film’s theme song, “More” became an international hit and is as memorable as the film itself.
In this clip, we see baby chicks being dyed for Easter gifts, geese being force fed to create foie gras and cows being massaged and fed beer as part of the process of being transformed into Kobe beef.
A short film made during the UK premier of the restored version of Goodbye Uncle Tom.
At the conclusion of their 1971 European tour, Sun Ra and His Arkestra visited Paris and performed for the French television show Jazz Session. The result was a stunning piece of musical theater shot in beautiful black and white and broadcast on January 8, 1972.
This is the show in its entirety. It begins with a brief introduction by the program’s creator Bernard Lion (Leo) who, along with being a hardcore jazz enthusiast and record producer, also directed videos for Serge Gainsbourg.
Whether you are a fan of Sun Ra or not, I think you’ll find this quite fulfilling.
Rock Scene was a mid-70s to early 80s black and white picture magazine edited by prominent rock writer Lisa Robinson (later of Vanity Fair) and her husband Richard Robinson (who produced Lou Reed’s first solo record and the Flamin’ Groovies’ Teenage Head). They were a well-known power couple in New York rock circles and had easy access to any and every rocker they wanted to meet. Rock Scene was where you could read about superstar acts like Rod Stewart, Alice Cooper, David Bowie, Queen and Elton John, as well as cult acts like Mumps, Lou Reed, the Ramones, Cherry Vanilla, The New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Blondie, The Dictators, Suicide, Talking Heads, Iggy, Kim Fowley, the Dead Boys, Willy DeVille, John Cale, etc.
Rock Scene was all about the backstage and party scene and it was very “insider,” even featuring articles about rock journalists (Nick Kent, Lester Bangs, Charles Shaar Murray) and well-known groupies like Sable Starr, Bebe Buell and Cyndria Foxe. The contributing photographers included the legendary Bob Gruen, Leee Black Childers, Danny Fields, Roberta Bayley, Stephanie Chernikowski and Richard Creamer. Wayne County even had an advice column called “Ask Wayne”!
I first started reading Rock Scene with the March 1976 issue (above) when I was a ten-year-old and I bought every issue for years. I think from that very first issue I read, Rock Scene helped me define the identity I wanted to have and the life I wanted to lead. Growing up reading Rock Scene instilled in me a desire to want to move to New York and to meet these people. I never aspired to having a real job, I just wanted to hang out at Max’s Kansas City and do drugs with all the cool weirdos I read about in Rock Scene. (Of course Max’s was long gone before I got there…)
It’s not every day that a journalist becomes part of a work of art. In a stroke of autobiographical fervor a few years ago Christian Boltanski had sold the rights to his daily life to a wealthy collector, who installed 24/7 live cameras all over his studio at the southern edge of Paris. These tapes become part of a massive unfolding record entitled simply The Life of C.B. Enter one unsuspecting American journalist prepared to shoot an interview there… A French TV crew had just been chastised by the artist for trying to glamorize him with their multi-camera shoot, and he was in ill temper before we began. But he soon became both reflective and jolly, his rueful sense of humor occasionally igniting like a firecracker.
Boltanski is acknowledged to be France’s most important living artist. His dark and prodigious body of work is esteemed by critics and crowds alike, and it seemed high time, at 66, that he represented France at the Venice Biennale. For the task of filling the French pavilion this year, he created an overwhelming jungle-gym of metal pipe and literally streaming video (whizzing through the vast structure as a giant ribbon of black-and-white frames). The images are of day-old infants, photos cut from Polish newspapers that announce births routinely. Every 10 minutes or so, a bell rings and the frames halt, randomly focusing on a single baby. It’s a loud, visceral and claustrophobic encounter with Boltanski’s most recent meditation on long-time fascinations: chance and identity. Chance is both scary and exhilarating.
He’s created a colossal machine that’s a demonic hybrid of printing press and film projector. As architecture, it made me think of Piranesi, a kind of enveloping prison. It exalts the mechanical, by alluding to the Industrial Age, and satirizes it with a whiff of Chaplin’s Modern Times. Chance is interactive: In the chamber just beyond the main hall is a screen that visitors can control with a big button at the entry. Faces sliced into three segments jumpcut at high speed, such that the recombinant photos whirl like a giant slot machine. Or cards being shuffled. Games of chance. Winning and losing. But the work never veers far from the assertion that we all lose in the end… Is Boltanski a pessimist? He’ll say not really, that in fact he’s happier than ever knowing that the world will go on without him. Nor is he a fatalist. To him, nothing is written so fate is an illusion.
