Vivid Handiwork: Thollem + Manucinema
Thollem's US tour, Thollem Electric: In The Valley Of The Cloudbuilder, runs March–April 2013: calendar here.
Every now and then an idea turns up that's so to the point it's a shock never to have run into it before. Tuia Cherici is an Italian filmmaker (video) working in Berlin who calls her practice and its results Manucinema, as in "manual cinema" (or, if you're Italian, mano + cinema). Setting up her camera, her lights and her materials as if for stop-motion animation (which she also does) she leaves the camera running and manipulates the materials in realtime, pushing and pulling cutout images, objects and talismans, bits and pieces through landscapes of variously textured materials, liquids and particulate matter.
The result is uncannily like stop-motion animation that we viewers have slipped into, through-the-looking-glass style: the visual laws and rhythms of animation are in full effect but we, too, are subject to them, occupying the temporal vernacular from the inside. Indeed, fifteen minutes into the Thollem Electric concert one of my fellow viewers marveled at the work-intensiveness of what he still thought was stop-motion. I had to extricate him from the looking glass.
Ideas, of course, are cheap, and the greater their Aha! factor the greater the peril of inane realization. And — the greater the satisfaction of seeing that peril avoided. A glance at Cherici's bio confirms that Manucinema was not a moment's glib brainstorm, but the organic outcome of an abiding commitment to rigorous principles of experimentation and improvisation: how to make moving pictures in the way of improvised music? (Cherici is also a musical improvisor.) The deeply lived questions that gave eventual rise to Manucinema resound in its results, carving out for them inhabitable spaces.
Not that we necessarily want to inhabit those spaces. They are demystified looking-glass portraits of our sociopolitical circumstances too vivid and raw to be anywhere we'd want to live, if we didn't already. Which is one of the many planes of perfect intersection between Cherici's visual work and Thollem's music. To keep it concise, let's just say that everything said above applies, mutatis mutandis, to Thollem's animated, sui generis keyboard genius — and to his fully committed positive anarchism: Thollem's peripatetic, perpetually-on-tour life, always making music and always radically collaborating, expresses itself at every level of scale from how he navigates the socioeconomy to how he plays. (And even, yes, to how he interviews, as those of you who saw him on The Late Now March Music Modern Special 2013 know: the mischief he gave his poor interviewer! That's why those flaccid name-brand talk-show hosts stick to the vapid mercenaries and steer clear of the anarchists! I loved every minute of it.)
My first encounter with Thollem was at a house concert in very warm, intimate space with a baby grand piano. It was Thollem acoustic, astounding us with "comprovised" tours-de-force somewhere at the transcendent juncture of free post-post-jazz, Debussy, and three million other things. We invited him to bring that world to The Late Now at The Piano Fort on March 9, four days before I saw him do his Thollem Electric work at Backspace as part of his March-April US Tour, Thollem Electric: In The Valley Of The Cloudbuilder.
Driving a Fender Rhodes steampunked with a tangle of effects pedals, Thollem took us on a guerrilla expedition through a craggy and varied topography of, you know, anarcho blues lullaby noise avant circus free jazz punk. Further armed with a mic, Thollem sang us the hard way through our amply, and not everywhere just literally, war-torn times.
Thollem's acoustic work is undomesticated chamber music. Thollem Electric is feral taser-opera.
The Thollem Electric tour draws on two current albums. One is the fourth and latest release from Tsigoti, a band with Thollem and three Italian musicians: Read Between the Lines... Think Outside Them. (Don't forget to heed the advice in the title.) The other is the début album by The Bad News From Houston, a band with Thollem and John Dieterich: In The Valley Of The Cloudbuilder. Both albums are available on Post-Consumer Records.
Take a look/listen for yourself below — even if, as Thollem sings, "Maybe you don't even exist." And if the Thollem Electric tour comes your way, catch it. (Say hi to Thollem and Angela.)
Support your local (well, world-local) anarchist-musician-artists! These are our modern dark age's troubadours and monastics, keeping it real. See Thollem wherever you get the chance, and check out Tuia Cherici's Manucinema, and her work on vimeo.
Leo Daedalus hosts The Late Now, the thinking mammal's avant-variety-talk show. He also writes about and engages polymorphously in things art-cultural.
