#bigg taj

[noyzhiphop]

Noyz x Bigg Taj

'British Library Freestyle'

Directed by Narvision FIlms

[acinemadownalane-blog]

Review: Whatever Gets You Through The Night - Madeleine Wood

  Madeleine Wood gives us her thoughts on Daniel Warren's Whatever Gets You Through The Night- a showcase of Scottish musical talent doing what they do in the wee small hours, which was screened on Friday 15 February as part of the Glasgow Film Fesitval...

  I would like to tell the director of Whatever Gets you through the Night, Daniel Warren, that his film is a beautiful and respectful showcase of Scottish musical culture. The film shows musicians performing their songs at locations that mean something to their songwriting history, or in the midst of performance, between the hours of 12am and 4am. This included footage taken at live events orchestrated by Cora Bisset through the ‘Whatever Gets You Through The Night’ project.  

  The film does a great service to the depth and breadth of the talent we host and grow here in Scotland. I liked the continuity he managed to find between the experimental beat-boxing voice performance of Bigg Taj and Wounded Knee, with the passionate maturity of Cora Bisset accompanied by Swimmer One, with her rendition of ‘If You Dance With The Devil (You Really Can’t Complain)’.  

My love of Scottish music aside, I have to admit that I thought it would need a narrative structure to bind the piece together to give it a cogency for those unfamiliar with the scene. I was pleasantly surprised. The many intercut montages, shot from car windows, of Scotland in the gloaming, cities lit up at night and mountains reflecting on the lochs, were decidedly calming. They provided a narrative all of their own that we have all experienced in our native or adopted Scottish home. It all felt a bit like a car journey home after a great gig. The songs are still ringing in your ears and you feel a vague sense of belonging to a big club of happy attendees, the strange contentment borne of fatigue and hangover. Rachel Sermanni’s ‘Lonely Taxi, 2am’ did just the job for me.

  This feeling was apparently not shared by Warren who, in his introduction to the film, proclaimed that he could not have dramatised the film because it was impossible to know what was going to unfold in the wee small hours. I felt that he saw this as a shortcoming to his film and that he tried to make up for this in confusing segments of interpretive dance and night-vision CCTV footage. In the introduction he also claimed that the purpose of the film was also to explore the effect of the night upon the performances. It must be said that during most of the songs, it was impossible to tell if they took place in the hours between 12am and 4am or just after lunchtime.

  It is for this reason that I will not be e-mailing Warren with anything warm and fuzzy. Instead I felt that the majority of the credit in this film must go to the capabilities of the musical acts and the orchestration by Cora Bissett of the live events. Go and listen for yourself; you’d have to be hard of heart not to feel a sense of pride in our disproportionately sized music scene in our wee isle.

  The 'Whatever Gets You Through The Night' 16-track album featuring all the acts in the film can be downloaded from http://throughthenight.bandcamp.com/ Madeleine Wood

[iamwoundedknee-blog]

Whatever Gets You Through The Night

The album is available now:

Whatever Gets You Through The Night

and a film is forthcoming:

Wounded Knee meets Bigg Taj uptown