Music: Otomo Yoshihide
Film: Ito Ryusuke
Presented by Yasunori Ikunishi
A meeting of big names in the experimental film and music worlds took place at Super Deluxe tonight in front of a full house. Ito's ultra high-speed, stunningly low-tech, almost-silent film reels were accompanied by Otomo's junk-yard orchestral assemblage with a turntable, guitar, and oh so much more. Using found footage and found objects spliced together to make their artistic worlds, Otomo and Ito seemed to come from a similar place. The message is distorted, objects are mangled, and there is sonic and visual rubble. But, Ito's choice of bright colors seemed to offer some kind of hope for happiness though maybe already lost in the remains of his impossibly corroded images. Otomo meanwhile mixed Merzbow-level noise with crystal clear guitar tones and sine tones that cut through the sounds collected by the dangling contact mic swinging above and around the turntable. In good Otomo style, all this was produced with unexpectedly precise deliberation, it seemed. It takes a skilled manipulator of noise to be able to draw out these kinds of complex human emotions from somewhere in the middle of all that noise. Think about Wall-e.
More than just the individual performances though, the inter-media synthesis seemed to be happening. The result wasn't just a combination of sound and image, but a sort of haptic experience with sound emanating from multichannel speakers, bouncing off the walls along with the unrelenting blinking images of cartoons, explosions, porn, chanbara samurai films among the undecipherable colored mess. In short, I was assured something cosmically grand was taking place. The difference between this and Wall-e though, is that the question is not about whether this music can make people happy. But that's fine. That kind of metaphysical problem has to be dealt with by something or someone even grander... like, the Creator. Or Wall-e.
Solid.
Rating: **** out of 5 stars
