Manu Delago & Dominic Johnson Live Show Review: 5/29, Martyrs’, Chicago
Dominic Johnson and Collin O’Brien perform Beats, the Bauhaus, and the Birth of Abstract Film last night at Martyrs’
BY JORDAN MAINZER
Chicago International Movies + Music (CIMM) has transitioned from a weekend festival to an organization with scattered events exploring the intersection between music and film, and I can think of no better bill than last night’s at Martyrs’ to go along with their mission. Austrian Hang player, percussionist, and composer Manu Delago took a break from his month-long NYC residency with Bjork to come to Chicago and perform a solo set and locally debut his nature film-album experience Parasol Peak. Violist Dominic Johnson also shared the Chicago debut of his Kennedy Center project Beats, the Bauhaus, and the Birth of Abstract Film, with drummer Collin O’Brien in tow. Two contrasting styles of film tied together through their responses to music, the performances took music that stood on its own and rendered it inseparable from their associated images.
The inspiration for Parasol Peak came from Delago’s filming of a music video for the song “Freeze” from his 2016 album Metromonk. Filmed live in the Alps by 14 cameras, without a cameraman, and using mirrors to create a panoramic view of the scenery, it was cool but an inefficient use of a crew, many people tagging along just to carry Delago’s equipment. Delago then thought, “What if I play with multiple musicians--all of whom can carry their own instruments?” The result was Parasol Peak, where Delago and six other musicians (plus a crew) recorded eight songs at eight different altitudes of the Alps, each track composed specifically for the altitude and physical layout of the mountain. For instance, when the musicians had to be stacked vertically on the mountain, unable to see one another, they essentially played a game of telephone in order to keep the rhythm, one person starting when they heard the person below or above them start playing. On a track like “North Cluster”, they couldn’t hear each other; the track is much more atmospheric, and the band developed a series of visual cues to play it. Overall, watching the filmed performance of the live-recorded album, you really got an appreciation for the concrete--how the sounds came from not only blowing into cold instruments but the clattering of gear against gear, or gear against earth, human against the elements.
Seeing Delago perform on Hang offers a similarly visceral experience. Seeing how the instruments make bass sounds from feedback against the microphone or give off texture with scrapes of his mallets, producing melodies and beats filled with cascading arpeggios and thumping techno, is simply amazing, and has me eagerly awaiting his new album out in September. (He performed a new track last night.) But Parasol Peak is a singular achievement of filmed performance, one that situates Delago alone above other creatively ambitious peers.
The films in Johnson’s piece, in contrast, by directors such as Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Marcel Duchamp, and Laszlo Maholy-Nagy, consisted of mostly shapes, or perhaps objects, moving methodically and minimally but not mathematically, leaving room for breaking the rules. The music fit the images surprisingly well, fast-paced for Ruttmann’s Lichtspiel: Opus II (1921), rumbling, slow-rolling, and synth poppy for Richter’s Rhythmus 23 (1923). Considering that Bauhaus had roots in German Expressionism but wasn’t defined by it, the combination of Johnson’s viola and the steady harmonic drone created by the echo of the drums, pervading the performance throughout, fit the emotion of the piece just right.
Sure, in certain instances, the music and the film blended perfectly, beats pulsating in conjunction with the sporadic appearance of windows of light on Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale (1924), disorienting tones complementing hypnotic, “falling through time” visuals on Ruttmann’s Lichtspiel: Opus IV (1925). And the hip hop-cum-industrial beats providing the soundtrack for Maholy-Nagy’s Lightplay: Black-White-Grey (1930) came across as a tongue-in-cheek reference to technological innovation, good and bad. But the moments like during Ruttmann’s Lichtspiel: Opus III (1924) were most impressive: It was hard to imagine something borderline funky working with Bauhaus film, but Johnson and O’Brien pulled it off.
Though really, after seeing both of these performances, it’s hard to imagine either artist failing to find new ways to experience film, music, nature, and performance.
