MÚM: SING ALONG TO SONGS YOU DON’T KNOW

Iceland is incredibly beautiful, a place of alien landscapes and sublime otherworldly beauty. The music from múm reflects that unearthly beauty. It is its source of inspiration.
 
For Örvar Smárason, “the preservation of Icelandic culture is important to us, but more important is the evolution of Icelandic culture. We have to be aware so we won’t drown ourselves in disposable crap and cheap shit and that our culture moves in a different direction. There is room for the old traditions and we need them, but we have to keep building.” Múm was formed in 1998 and has to date released numerous albums, several singles, remixes and soundtracks. Today only two of the founding members are left: Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Toreyjarson Smárason. This year, the musical collective releases its fifth studio creation Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know, a collection of delicate, playful, strange magical compositions with intriguing titles.

The latest offerings from múm disclose their Icelandic heritage, always present in the sub-strata of their music. Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know is perhaps one of their best work to date.

The soundscapes múm meticulously construct emerge from traditional and non-traditional instruments, soft melodious vocals and experimental electronica. Gunnar Örn Tynes indicates, “Our songs are melancholy and emotive [...] I want to say that we are not sad persons [...], but we appreciate these sensations in the music or in the cinema, in any artistic form.”

With a replacement singer, sweet-flowing choruses are in abundance, along with swells of delicate and orchestrated melodies, but the crackling electronics have given way to more acoustic instruments and strings, even though electronic remnants can be heard throughout. The playfulness is still there as well, only now it’s supplied by ukulele and delicate piano tinkerings.

Gunnar Örn Tynes clearly recognizes that “the studio can be a very sterile environment sometimes, people can get very self-conscious, so we prefer to record in different places.” This may be the reason why the listener encounters in múm’s sonic landscapes a charming strangeness. Múm’s music can leave nobody indifferent, even to those who insist that they are far removed from their music. Just witness the strong reactions they provoke in certain music reviewers, for instance. Nonetheless, múm undeniably combines a harmonious mixture of trance inducing instrumentation and melodies with a soft, yet robust energy. With each of their composition, múm demonstrates their creative inventiveness along with their openness to experimentation, successfully combining analogue and digital technologies.
 
Of their music, Smárason indicates, “Sometimes it feels like escapist music; music for people to get away with. Sometimes it’s music that’s very slow and refers to some other world. It’s about the music connecting everybody to parts of themselves they don’t feel that often [...] We have done music for an opera, have set to music Icelandic poetry. Iceland is simply so small that everything must work with each other, even if they have quite different backgrounds.” “We have always drawn a lot of our samples from the natural world,” says Gunnar Örn Tynes.

Artfully moving between ethereal pop rhythms, electronic beat and sweet melancholy, múm creates sonic cathedrals: beautiful, organic and prone to sprout strange, alien tendrils of sound. Yet under the surface of this sonic sorcery, there is a melancholic undertow, a sense of sadness and undeniable loss washing over the tracks. Múm maps out an emotional terrain populated with dreams, miracles and bittersweet taste of irretrievable loss, bringing to mind those lines from Walt Whitman’s Halcyon Days

Not from successful love alone,
Nor wealth, nor honor’d middle age, nor victories of politics or war;
But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm,
As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky,
As softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the frame, like freshier, balmier air,
As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs
 really finish’d and indolent-ripe on the tree,
Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
The brooding and blissful halcyon days!

Overall, the bulk of the tracks in Sing Along To Songs You Don’t Know are tastefully crafted, experimental pop songs with evocative, sometimes seductive singing, while the musicians explore the outer edges of chamber pop with wispy tones and textures. Sing Along To Songs You Don’t Know is undeniably another fine example of how múm is evolving and continually expanding on their already diverse musical palette. It may require a few spins before the quaint peculiarities become charming, but eventually the album will evoke the feeling of waking up late with vague pensive memories.

MOVIES: ON FAVOURITES AND OBSESSIONS (SAM PECKINPAH) PART II

BLOOD OF A POET: SAM PECKINPAH AND THE WILD BUNCH

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism,

a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

George Eliot, Adam Bede

 

Films have the power to possess you, enthral you, snaring you in its poetic lyricism. In that short phrase, “Blood of a poet”, Pauline Kael conveys something vital and elemental about Sam Peckinpah’s rich cinematic oeuvre, something that is often ignored: the resonance, the vitality and poetic eloquence of his aesthetics. Instead, when the name Sam Peckinpah comes up, the focus is frequently on regurgitating Peckinpah’s personal mythology. Peckinpah is said to be many things: a drunk, a coke addict, a sentimental romantic, a misogynist and chauvinist. And from the late ‘60s to the ‘70s, Peckinpah was both celebrated and condemned as the cinematic poet of violence. But less is said about his poeticism, humanism and troubled obsession with the role of violence in dislocating pedestrian notions and pious hypocrisies held sacred in our official culture. He is certainly not tame; he overturned every absolute he encountered, so fearlessly that it is impossible not to recognise in him the wounded Romantic and agonised believer.

When asked what my favourite film is, my reply is always The Wild Bunch. But when asked why The Wild Bunch, I often wonder how to work out an adequate reply.

The Wild Bunch (original poster)

One’s most impressionable years are one’s childhood years. The first song you hear or the first film you watch; these all become woven into the fabric of your being, retaining emotional and somatic resonance, always tied to who you were and where you were when you first saw it.

I grew up on an unrelenting diet of Westerns. And because of those early years spent consuming Westerns, as a young child, I’d always say I was a Gregory Peck girl. But when asked what my favourite all time film is, I always unhesitatingly reply Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch.  Of all the films in my memory palace, The Wild Bunch holds a special place. It had a profound visceral effect on me when I first encountered it as a young child; it still persists to exert its hypnotising power on me. It continues to be extraordinary, representing bravura editing, physical direction and an appreciation of the American literary tradition which includes Faulkner, Hemingway and Mailer. However it is its profound humanism which has captured my heart. And Peckinpah’s humanism was hard won. The affirmation of virtue in his films is intimately entwined with vice and human frailty; the impression one receives is that of a man trying to claw himself back to the decent places within himself. His oeuvre is suffused with a deep and expansive love for low-rent miners, bums, losers, loners, drifters and misfits who struggle to assert themselves in a world that is doing its best to be rid of them; for the tarnished valour of flawed heroes who discover deep within themselves a possibility of honour, long thought lost but re-discovered when all that’s left is to die protecting it.

Book-ended by a Götterdämmerung of screen violence, The Wild Bunch set the precedent for all filmmakers who wish to follow in its footsteps; it raised the bar, becoming the father of the modern action film. Neither Walter Hill’sThe Long Riders nor Michael Mann’s Heat would be possible without The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah’s meditation on the role violence in deconstructing masculinity left a legacy that is clearly acknowledged by many contemporary filmmakers, including John Woo, Quentin Tarantino, Coppola, Scorsese and Kathryn Bigelow.

I have fond memories of the opening sequence in The Wild Bunch. It never fails to be extraordinary. That First Act, in all its terrifying, gut-wrenching piece of physical direction and obsessive attention to detail, represents all that is truly dazzling about Peckinpah, who was then at the height of his powers. We are utterly seduced by the Peckinpah’s moral vision of proud, yet tarnished, warrior-heroes who know they are doomed relics to a heroic past.

The Wild Bunch tells the story of the last days of the outlaw, Pike Bishop, and the men he leads. The action takes place in Peckinpah’s favourite fictional terrain: the no-man’s land of the Texas-Mexico border in 1913. Revolving round the band of aging outlaws who have outlived their time, they find themselves trapped between revolutionary and reactionary forces in 1913 Mexico, between a disappearing America and an encroaching modernism, and in flight from bounty hunters working for the American railroad company they’ve robbed; it is a study of violence in American life and the meaning of loyalty, honour and courage.

I remember the first time I encountered that memorable First Act, it grabbed me; transfixing me to my seat, convincing me I was in the presence of someone who understood what I needed to know. It was the opening scene of those angelic looking children laughing at some game they are playing. There is a cut, and Peckinpah shows us what’s making the children laugh; they are slowly feeding the live scorpion to a bed of swarming red ants. Later they will set fire to the ants and scorpions amid ecstatic cries of delight. While it establishes the tone of the movie, that scene sums up Peckinpah’s philosophy of what it means to be in the world made savage by man and the consequent unenviable Promethean struggle to become otherwise. We are not born, rather we become. I knew then in my young mind that this wasn’t going to be a John Ford movie or for that matter, a John Wayne Western. This magnificent opening sequence, followed by that triangulation of elements culminating in that famous shoot-out in the square, and terminating with Buck getting shot by Pike Bishop (William Holden) represented a radical departure from the traditional narrative built into the Western genre of its day; we the viewers are now in a welcome alien territory. That First Act clearly cut through all the dearly held preconceptions of the Western, exerting a profound de-familiarising effect, holding the mirror up to its contemporary audience, putting into question the national fascination with violence which had suffused the inner fantasy life of late sixties’ culture.

Exploding on to the screens in 1969, The Wild Bunch changed everything contemporary audiences knew or expected from the Westerns. Book-ended with dizzying shoot-outs that would make Michael Mann and John Woo weep, Peckinpah’s editors Robert Wolfe and Louis Lombardo intercut variable-speed footage (those much admired slow-mo shoot outs), multi-camera filming and montage editing to create wondrous sensuous kaleidoscopes of operatic carnage and balletic action, seeming to make the kinetic spectacle more intense and visceral. Unsurprisingly, given contemporary sensibilities, riots broke out at the film’s first screenings, particularly at the Kansas City previews.

The Wild Bunch forever changed the art of filmmaking.  Pauline Kael is correct when she surmises, “All they saw was the violence” but what is often forgotten is the haunting lyricism and strange complexity of The Wild Bunch. Indeed, we are often informed by the critics that Peckinpah’s films represent anti-social nihilism. He has been labelled sadistic, amoral and misogynistic. The film-maker, who came from a pioneering family with a long history of judges and legislators (who go all the way back to the inception of the native town and country) who played a role in shaping local, state and national history, came to be known as ‘Bloody Sam’ and grew up watching studio era films, witnessing firsthand the disappearance of the American West. In the early 1960s, following a successful career making series television, Peckinpah established himself as a distinctive revisionist of the Western genre with Ride the High Country, Major Dundee and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

Sam Peckinpah

The Wild Bunch is his masterpiece, disclosing a Peckinpah as a self-conscious artist; highly sensitive to the European and American literary and cinematic legacy to which he was paying homage and the conventions he delighted in up-turning. At the same time, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and The Wild Bunch reveal a man committed to making sense of the cultural tumult surrounding him. “The outlaws of the West have always fascinated me”, Sam would later explain. “They were people who lived not only by violence, but for it. And the whole underside of our society has always been violence – it will be and still is. It’s a reflection of society itself”.

The production of The Wild Bunch in 1969, a savage allegory of the Vietnam War, reflects Peckinpah’s guiding preoccupation with violence and trauma as central to American notions of heroism, masculinity, sacrifice and redemption. Clearly obsessed with the nature of violence in contemporary media, statement after statement demonstrates a Peckinpah grappling with the torporific effects of contemporary media, especially the nightly images of television violence. A series of letters, including one to Richard Nixon, reveals the profundity of his adverse responses to My Lai. Excerpts from a 1972 interview with Peckinpah reveals a man struggling with comprehending violence and aggression, particularly the animal origins of human violence.

This is clearly an artist as horrified observer of turbulent times, preoccupied with the brutalities against the body and the deformation of the spirit that defined that era, articulating  in his cinematic oeuvre sixties radical thought and anti-establishment sentiments. But by the mid-1970s, Peckinpah came to recognize the slipperiness of cinematic violence, the inevitable fact that a given horrific image could provoke repulsion in one viewer but thrilling amusement in another. He came to the acknowledgement that regardless of his political intentions, he was unable to control the terms of his films’ confrontation with viewers or the effects of his spectacle. He was dismayed by audiences’ reception and simplistic interpretation of The Wild Bunch and their seeming failure to appreciate the psychological and spiritual costs of physical trauma and his critique of violence in Straw Dogs.

Peckinpah himself once said that some people want to walk out of his films: “But they can’t. They can’t turn their faces away. They watch, and that makes them mad”. One important difference between him and his deluded imitators lie in how deeply and passionately felt his violence is, and how securely it is tied to character, to milieu, to story, and to meaning.

Peckinpah drove home the point that the viewer is not innocent; he is always implicated in this violent world. To accomplish this, Peckinpah used everything at this disposal, everything and the kitchen sink, to draw the viewer into his morality tales. Throughout his career, he deployed stylistic and narrative techniques that implicate the viewer, compelling him to reflect upon and even feel accountable for the spectacle they witness.

Foremost among these were Peckinpah’s distinctive montage-based aesthetic characterized by multiple-camera filming at varying speeds and rapid cutting disorienting contemporary viewers who were accustomed to straightforward cinematography and linear editing. The Wild Bunch contained more individual cuts than any other in Hollywood history; 3642 cuts appeared in the original version compared to the roughly 600 in an average two-hour production of the late 1960s. Many of the cuts are as short as three or four frames, or one-eighth of a second. The film’s opening and closing sequences feature hundreds of cuts of varying lengths; some again lasting for only three or four frames and conflicting rapidly cut images rupture the viewer’s sense of time, space and movement. The final battle scene, for example, unfolds with 339 cuts in only seven minutes of film. The result is an emphasis on kinetic spectacle and a distension of temporal continuity. It was Eisensteinian montage freed from ideology and turned to a profound psychological realism which left few films that came in its wake untouched by its influence. With Peckinpah, every bullet, hit and fall hurts with real feeling. The action is always charged with volatile tension and expresses something far darker and subversive: the thirst for violence and aggression that brings the viewer to violent entertainment in the first place.

Like Bunuel, Peckinpah wants to worry his audience and force them to confront the awful truth that a capacity to violence lie within all of us; his excesses derive from a sane, passionate, old-fashioned set of values confronted by insane, uncompassionate world. Asked about The Wild Bunch and his attitude towards violence, Peckinpah replied, “Actually it’s an anti-violence film because I use violence as it is. It’s ugly, brutalizing, and bloody fucking awful. It’s not fun and games and cowboys and Indians, it’s a terrible, ugly thing. And yet there’s a certain response that you get from it, an excitement, because we’re all violent people, we have violence within us. I don’t know if you can legislate against it. It’s in children, as I bring out in the film. I don’t know about violence on television. I object to it because I think it’s usually so goddamned dull. They just have a lot of violence for its own sake, it’s not motivated. Violence is a part of life, and I don’t think we can bury our heads in the sand and ignore it”.

But it is in the central section of the film, when the Bunch visits Angel’s village, a pivotal scene of the movie, that most critics who haven’t really seen the movie often neglect to mention. Angel’s village, despite having survived ransacking by Mapache’s bandits, is a garden, built into a sunny glade and appears as an oasis to The Bunch, who have become used to using their wits to survive in a harsh cruel world. In an all too brief moment of respite from constant battle, we find our tarnished battle weary Bunch in an idyllic hacienda, quietly reflecting all that has come to pass and the doomed inevitability of their chosen paths. In this Edenic idyll, we recall that Robert Frost poem, while we watch the Bunch in an all-too brief moment of pensive reflection. In that Arden, these warriors realise that they are rapidly running out time and witness a world where they are increasingly strangers, a world they have missed out on; and the possibility of what could have been. It is a poignant scene. Pike Bishop and the men he leads realises, for them, there will be no recovery of innocence, “All of us wish to be a child again; even the worse of us, perhaps the worse of us most of all”. While it is an idealised version of what they wished their lives could have been, it is undeniably a pivotal sequence where the Bunch are caught between a violent past and their irretrievable march towards a doomed destiny. We watch them ride out of that verdant hacienda to the Mexican villagers’ lamentations and tearful farewells, and like them, we know, we just know it in our bones that they are riding to their final deaths; that they will never return to this moment again: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both, And be one traveller, long I stood, And looked down one as far as I could, [...] Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.”

ON THE (IM)POSSIBILITY OF REDEMPTION

In The Wild Bunch, we paradoxically encounter in the film’s denouement the life-affirming, increasingly fugitive codes such as honour, courage, loyalty, friendship, grace under pressure that have increasingly become clichés. Like Hawthorne, Peckinpah shares a quasi-religious streak, though it is set at an oblique, almost unrecognizable angle. For Hawthorne, the greatest sin is for one person to subjugate another completely; for Peckinpah, the greatest sin is always betrayal, which never cuts so deep as when it cuts closest.

The final shoot out

The key to the final scene is Angel, deliberately named, who serves as Bishop’s conscience. Angel is the protagonist capable of acting on ideals, of proclaiming his ideals in an uncompromising way. Over the course of the story, Bishop is forced to confront the ugly truth about himself and sees himself, not as he liked to be (a man of his word who lives by his own code of honour and integrity), but as he really is (a man whose code is a sham). Having abandoned Deke Thornton to his fate, the straw that finally breaks Bishop is when he realises that he has also abandoned Angel to his fate, who has now been taken prisoner and is being tortured by Mapache. The realisation finally dawns on Bishop that he has violated his own code repeatedly, that his is a hypocrisy serving to disguise the brutality and moral bankruptcy of his own life. This awakening propels Bishop and his Bunch to walk into Mapache’s territory in an attempt to rescue Angel, and thereby their own troubled conscience. But they know that this is doomed. Standing in the bordello, Bishop’s aging face is troubled, weary, full of regret. Realising that he could have been a very different man, he considers his present circumstances and is filled with self-loathing, guilt and grief. “Let’s go”, he says to the Bunch. Lyle Gorch (Warren Oats) realising the import of this exhortation replies, “Why not?” Having made their decision, the Bunch, in that famous doomed walk, marches off to the death they know is awaiting them. In front of his bandit army and the Bunch, Mapache slits Angel’s throat prompting Bishop to shoot him. In the extraordinary stillness that follows, we the viewers wait in bated expectation. What follows is the apocalypse, the final sacrificial bloodbath. But what is truly affirmed is their ethic of reciprocity, and their unhesitating attempt to give their lives, and deaths, some purpose, some meaning: “As for the meaning of life, I do not believe it has any…We make of it what we can and that is all there is about it.” (Isaiah Berlin)

 

The Wild Bunch: framed for posterity

Depicted in The Wild Bunch are portraits of flawed individuals, but also an existential sensibility caught between quixotic romanticism and the harsh realism of lived reality. What Peckinpah conveys in this magnificent uncompromising film is the possibility of an unsettling agonistic desperation to salvage quasi-knightly virtues of honour and the remnants of humanity, of the possibility of redemption for sinners who know they are beyond the pale. For me, the power of The Wild Bunch, to quote Max Weber, derives from “the secret anguish that modern man bears”. This anguish in turn is turned towards a feverish affirmative quest for long-lost for an incorruptible humanity.

Múm: Poison Ivy and Marmalade

Múm (pronounced “moom”) hails from Iceland. Formed in 1997 by Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Smárason, they were joined by twin sisters Gyöa and Kristín Valtýsdóttir.

Samuel Palmer

Múm’s fourth album, Go Go Smear Poison Ivy, released in 2007, exerts a perplexing hold on me. Characterized by soft vocals, eccentric beats and colourful effects, their sounds are produced from a variety of traditional and unconventional instruments. Incorporating harp, horn, clicks, reeds, bells and strings, the instrumentation is lush, hypnotic and multi-layered. Backed by an ensemble of hired musicians, their sounds intertwine lyrics with ambient multi-faceted instrumentation to construct a radiant, light-filled soundscape. It reinforces their reputation for producing dreamy lush electronic giving their music a refreshing unpredictability.

 

Described variously as electronic rock or experimental pop, Múm’s orchestration consistently takes the listener on a journey to another world. Go Go Smear Poison Ivy continues in this vein, the first release since the departure of Kristín Valtýsdóttir (her sister Gyöa left in 2002). The album’s sound does not represent a huge departure from their previous outings, but without Kristín Valtýsdóttir’s elfin-like vocals, Go Go Smear Poison Ivy is different enough to make one entertain the thought that this album is easily and possibly their best date. With two vocalists, Hildur Guonadóttir and Mr. Silla, the changes are dramatic enough to be noticed.

 

Over the course of the album, Múm takes the listener on a journey as far as the listener’s imagination will allow. Go Go Smear Poison Ivy starts with Blessed Brambles. It is possibly the longest track in the album, setting the tone of the album and prepares the listener for an other-worldly journey where fantasy and surrealism is allowed to reign. It also makes it quite clear that this is a very different Múm sound from previous excursions. But I am writing this because I’m trying to figure how why I have developed a particular fondness for the enticing Marmalade Fires. With is gently rolling melody, sprightly distorted beats, it is an undeniably a charming and cheerful sound.

 

My encounter with Múm and Marmalade Fires occurred through a happy coincidence. An acquaintance of mine was amused at my Sigur Rós obsession, along with my developing tastes for the music hailing from Scandinavia, in particular Iceland, and helpfully suggested that it might be worth my while sampling other similar sounds. His advice was that this meander round other soundscapes might prove not only healthy but useful as the last thing I would want is to fall out of love with Sigur Rós. He indicated that he spoke from experience as, apparently, this had happened with his earlier obsession with Moby. And yet, after several listening and without wanting to state the obvious, despite its instrumental prowess and stylings, Múm obviously isn’t Sigur Rós, and it would be unfair of me to expect them to render me speechless in the same way Sigur Rós does.

 

But Múm has got under my skin, especially Marmalade Fires. I’ve been playing that particular tune repeatedly for the past week; I can’t seem to leave it alone, which has now left me wondering about this current obsession. It is truly a charmingly cheerful tune. Relentlessly so.

 

This song getting under my skin leaves me perturbed. I find this inexplicable. Marmalade Fires is undeniably jaunty, innocently simple in its celebration of pleasurable melodic beats, seemingly inviting us to celebrate the sensory pleasures in life. It sweeps the listener into a swirl of happy nostalgic reminiscence. But the invitation to wallow in this pleasurable Proustian state increases my suspicion about my unfathomable obsession, hardening my resolve to dig beneath the surface of my repeated listenings.

 

All these thoughts ran through my head as I returned to Múm again today. It now dawns on me that Marmalade Fires has me thinking about the nature of happiness.

 

The conception of happiness has been obscured by our consumer based economy but now that the global economy and the political framework are in peril, the excesses of our buy-it-now, pay-for-it-later consumerist lifestyle is being shaken. And the conception of happiness commonly conceived as one which can be achieved through immediate gratification is put into question. Is happiness the same as the good life? Different cultures have varying standards by which to judge whether someone is happy or not. If one can be wrong about whether one is happy or not, then it follows that there may be an objective part of happiness. What is the relation between contentment and happiness? Does one entail the other or they mutually exclusive? Is happiness a psychological state? Or is there more to being happy than just thinking you’re happy? Is happiness a way of life? Well, this was the line of thought Marmalade Fires has set me on anyway. And as I tug away at my odd response to Marmalade Fires, I realise there is no better time than now to return to Aristotle to rethink what it means to be happy.

Aristotle

 

Our modern notion of happiness usually refers to a transitory elevated mood or feeling. Aristotle, by contrast, defined eudaimonia, or happiness, as “the best possible life”. And no doubt, it could be argued that this informs our understanding of what it means to be happy. But Aristotle approached the idea of happiness (eudaimonia) from an understanding that “what is good for man” must begin with understanding what it means to be “man” (ergon) and what is “correct and proper” for man.

 

At the same time, Aristotle writes, “And as much as they claim at living well, they seek bodily enjoyments, so that since these also seem to find their source in acquisitions, all focus is on obtaining wealth”. Aristotle understands man has having an infinite and unquenchable desire for wealth and to consume. In Politics, Aristotle argues that the unlimited desire to consume for the sake of mere living typically assumes a certain picture of good living, a life of unquenchable cheer and happiness, “And as much as they claim at living well, they seek after bodily enjoyments, so that since these also seem to find their source in acquisitions, all focus is on obtaining wealth”. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle calls such gratification “the pleasure from gain” (Book V, Chapter 2). And on these terms, such a pleasure-focused life promises to be free from suffering; it might seem to offer the same insulation against fate that mere living does.

 

I realise now what has been troubling me about Marmalade Fires. While sweetly cheerful, the sweet happiness promised by the sonic and aural pleasures of Marmalade Fires – a life of wallowing in enjoyment has inevitably awakened my innate scepticism. This easily gained pleasure and the model of life as readily available enjoyment seem a transitory one. Described by Aristotle, the life of enjoyment is not one somebody can immediately lead. Rather, it is a process that can never be fully sated. In other words, Aristotle warns us that pursuing the life of readily available enjoyment is a life where the priorities are wrong. Neither the unlimited pursuit of things, nor its use in a life wholly devoted to bodily pleasure grants sufficient weight to fulfilling our key capacities. For Aristotle, the pursuit of happiness and ethical action go together and the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of an ethical responsibility to welcome forms of otherness and difference. At best, a life of pursuing bodily and sensory enjoyment treats our capacities as a purely instrumental means of pursuing yet more stuff and more sensory pleasures.

Movies: On favourites and obsessions Part 1

Our favourite movies are never shown out of competitions at Cannes or the London Film Festival. They are the ones that have you hopping beside yourself, waiting impatiently for the special edition DVD box sets to be made available for your private delight and entertainment. They are the ones which become your guilty pleasure. The ones you always recommend to a friend and lover when you are asked what film he should watch and you cannot, you simply cannot believe it when he admits he has never watched or even heard of this movie that you’ve loved all your life. They are the ones that if someone told you they didn’t understand their appeal, it occurs to you that their refusal to understand is simply incomprehensible, a wilful obstinacy on their part, and the tempting thought surfaces unbidden:  you would love to terminate the friendship right there on the spot. They are the ones that make you feel that those on the screen will always remain with you, their fables and struggles always identifiable with yours, and that they are always right there to remind you about life’s lessons.   

Our favourite movies are the ones that explode through the doors of perception, rendering all that you once thought familiar strange, the once comforting turned utterly topsy-turvy and the strait-jacketed moral compass rendered askew. And didn’t you eagerly welcome their wild explosive entry into your world. Nothing remained the same after you welcome them into your life. They become the very fabric of your being, an element of your essence. You learn from them, your masters, understanding how to see the world otherwise. You welcome this.

You gradually build a memory palace to house your beloved favourites. It gradually becomes a repository, housing all those you secretly and obsessively hold dear to your heart. You begin to realise that your favourites, who remain forever unchanged and always with you, share an easy familiarity. You start noticing family resemblances. They have that stranger wildness, a quixotic complexity and intensity that is cultivated from gazing upon a world obsessively cataloguing it in all its banality and contrary wonder.  A leit motifemerges. Not a single one of these occupants are interested in the rational or the social universe belonging to the respectable world of suburbia. They are not tame.

Memory palace in an alchemical illustration

They share an obsessive thrill in documenting the lurid, burlesque, baroque and deviant excesses of human life in all its wondrous glory. Their movies howl upwards with enraged wildness, angered at witnessing the indignities that man is capable of. Their oeuvre betrays how hell bent they are on relentlessly erasing the fine line between cinematic fiction and lived ‘reality’. Yet, in spite of outward appearances, under all that carefully cultivated bravado, this lot combine visionary intensity with old-fashioned humanism, “Le plus terrible dans ce monde c’est que chacun a ses raison”. And in an increasingly cynical anaemic world, you love them. You truly, madly, deeply love them for wearing their naked hearts on their sleeves.

And who are this lot, the singular ones who share these strange family resemblances? You know them. They are David Lynch, Sam Peckinpah, Abel Ferrara, Roman Polanski, Werner Herzog, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ken Russell, John Waters, Lars Von Triers, Jan Svankmajer, Kubrick and Oshima Nagisa, to name but a few. 

To be continued…..

Of Animals and Flowers: thoughts on Animal Collective

Svankmejer's Alice

Animal Collective is a music collective of avant-garde musicians from Baltimore, Maryland. Records released under the name Animal Collective may include contributions from any or all of these members; the line-up is not uniform. The band members met in school and started recording together in various forms of collaboration from a young age.

 

Comprising Avey Tare (David Portner), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), Deakin (Josh Dibb), and Geologist (Brian Weitz), Animal Collective are the Peter Pans of indie-rock. Four thirty-somethings from Baltimore, whose stage names betray their regard for childhood, have made eight albums of head-spinning pop which evoke the fleeting highs and dreams of pre-pubescence where life seemingly stretches out with endless possibilities.

Although the band is sometimes classified as psych folk, indie-rock or noise rock, it is hard to define the Animal Collective sound as they often experiment with diverse styles and ideas from album to album. The group also runs Paw Tracks on which they have released their own material as well as material by artists such as Ariel Pink, Terrestrial Tones, and The Peppermints. 

 By all accounts, their ninth album is a dizzying knees-up that makes most music sound bloodless, common-or-garden and pathetically timid. Certainly, their eighth studio album, Merriweather Post Pavilion is exuberant, informed by an ecstatic boundless joy that surges ever forward, seemingly attempting to break the boundaries that encloses the everyday, and judging from the explosive opener in the In the Flowers, wherein Avey Tare’s incantation makes a plea for a temporary respite, “If I could just leave my body for the night”.

In the Flowers begins with a vision; Avey Tare is on his way home when he spies a boy, stoned and care free, dancing in a field. Responding as if he has stumbled across an alien scene, this spectacle renders him unable to respond to the dancer’s joy. Tare, it seems, simply cannot reconcile his own sadness with an embodied space, now made alien by another’s exuberant expression. Witnessing this scene, Tare’s rapturous incantation, “If I could just my body for the night” is perhaps a plaintive cry for another space, a cry to be shown the pathway to becoming otherwise, no matter how temporary. Tare consoles himself, now seeing the dance anew: “Then we could  be dancing no more missing you while I am gone / Then we could be dancing and you’d smile and say I like this song / And then ours would meet them we will recognise nothing’s wrong”. Here, In the Flowers, we find the choice made wherein Avey Tare chooses empathy instead of opting for jealousy and bitterness.  

Overall, Animal Collective’s instrumentation pushes the listener through the prism of the familiar into a world made strange. Such are their tactics of de-familiarisation that we are inexorably pushed through the rabbit-hole, coming up on the other side to a lush sonic landscape made anew. Forced into their world, we witness the seemingly banal re-made ecstatic and marvellous through the prism of aural love.  Even Summertime Clothes, a rapturous piece, is anchored in a seething electronic reef seeking to break the conventions of everyday (pop) sensibility.

The currency of hype, often the elephant in the room, is difficult to schematize, but it roughly equates to word-of-mouth, plus the apparatuses of journalism. Throw into this mix the special x-factor. Most bands associated with the h-word have x-factors that involve an aggregate of various extra-musical marginalia, fashions, back-stories, and unifying visual aesthetics. This is the stuff that musical journalists use to fatten their paragraphs and self-aggrandize their profession. Animal Collective dropped most of their shtick when they stopped wearing masks. Their x-factor is a rare one: they make fantastic, unique, relentless singular records with a regularity that suggests an enchanted acumen.

 And while it is misleading to impose a trajectory to the evolution of a band, Animal Collective has always resisted aesthetic stasis, easy compartmentalization or the readily formulaic and banal. Every subsequent offering from Animal Collective has been a re-imagination of its own sound-craft and song-craft. Merriweather Post Pavilion is easily their most lyrical and accessible, offering a diverse catalogue of sounds in a sonic language that soars every upwards, defying gravity and easy definitions. 

 For Animal Collective, their shtick is simply a quest for another way to carving out sounds. For them, music is not an end in itself but a medium, a portal towards something bewildering and obscure.  

Time will of course tell if Animal Collective lives up to their sonic ambitions of capturing myriad treasures. But for now, we can simply lie back and witness an ecstatic dancing and pulsing of sounds.

 

My Sigur Ros obsession

Recently compelled to re-visit a past obsession, for that is what listening  to Sigur Ros has provoked in me, an obsession bordering on the obsessive-compulsive, I wondered if the time has come to finally comprehend what draws me irrevocably to Sigur Ros. Yes, it is an obsession because listening to Sigur Ros is a guilty pleasure as I once was a true believer of Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits and Mark E Smith. Everything in my sonic universe gravitated around the pull of this triumvirate. So, I ask myself, what is it this pull that Sigur Ros exerts on me? Short answer: I ached for something other. And Sigur Ros truly represents an Otherness in my sonic universe.

Sigur Rós has often been categorised as an Icelandic post-rock band. The name is derived from the name of lead vocalist Jónsi Birgisson’s little sister Sigurrós. According to their website, it is pronounced “si-ur roas (as in roast).” They hail from the same creative and vibrant Icelandic music scene as múm and Amiina. They released their first ever foray into film-making with their tour documentary, Heima in late 2007. But to categorise them as post-rock is too easy, a readily made short-hand used by those music journos.

Listening to Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, Takk and in particular to Inni Mer Syngur Vitleysingur, I am transported gracefully by the breathtaking orchestration to a sensuous tonal landscape, seeped with quixotic melancholy and boundless joy. Here in this space I encounter an otherness. They make their instruments cry, coaxing sounds that are utterly other. This alien otherworldly landscape confounds description and without the usual bearings provided by the emotional compass of Tom Waits and The Fall, co-ordinates with which I have become familiar, I find myself bereft for words. The easy descriptions are, of course, too easy. The obvious motifs evoke blissfully, ethereal moments. Oh yes, it would be too easy to succumb to such descriptions, a cop-out even. Their musical inventions start small, with gentle coos and keyboard tinkering, then build and build until they’re cascading and tumbling over each other, high and alive somewhere overhead, inflated by ambitious instrumentation that could tear you to pieces and then pick you up and put you back together.

Their instrumentation tempts you to stare skywards, making you want to contemplate the vastness of the human spirit, believing that it is perfectly within our grasp to capture the music of the spheres. Arranged just so, their sounds encourage the breath to come alive, soaring, peaking and then weeping. The landscape their orchestration lays out before us is magnificent. And heartbreaking. Pulling us away from life, and yet, yet somehow managing to make life seem more meaningful. With strings, horns, piano and operatic cries, Sigur Ros show us the world made strange, but it is a world as we, or is it I, would like to see it.
 
 
To listen to Sigur Ros is to feel joy and the faint stirrings of something once thought long-lost found again. Inni Mer Syngur Vitleysingur makes it almost possible to believe. I find this quite confounding. How does it go? Credo quia impossible est, “I believe it because it is impossible”. I can’t listen to Sigur Ros without hearing the faint voice from my past reminding me of these words again. And yet, Sigur Ros’ orchestration encourages the temptation to slip away from the world as it is. But in the increasingly harsh world, some strange fragile beauty persists. Listening to Sigur Ros gently reminds me of this, making me wonder again, and affords a glimpse of a possibility to another way of being in and with the world. Because, as Angela Bassett says in Strange Days, “Memories were meant to fade, they were designed that way, this is your life, right here, right now”.