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I’ve been running a series of workshops as part of Blaze Festival with a group of creative producers who are in the process of creating their own Video Jam event from scratch. One of the first things we did was go round and name our favourite soundtracks. Noteworthy mentions included Clint Mansell’s score for Moon, praised for its use of silence, as was John Carpenter’s The Fog. Hans Zimmer’s rather more epic sweeping orchestral score for Intersteller was thrown in there, as was the original 1981 music for Evil Dead. Two that chimed with me particularly were Blade Runner and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (which was referred to as a ‘chick flick’? hmm). Yann Tiersenn’s score for Amélie was mentioned for being brilliant and ‘very French’ (here’s a spine tingling snippet), and there was a lot of love expressed for the synth beats in Turbokid, which reminded us of the really excellent music that underscores Drive - in its original guise. 

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Leeds based Esper Scout recently made their debut for Video Jam at Sounds from the Other City. A while back they released this music video, directed by one of our favourite filmmakers, Scout Stuart, whom we commissioned last year for Video Jam’s UK tour Spaces. (A trailer of Scout’s work for the tour, in collaboration with Joe Snape, can be seen/heard here.)

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“Sound is fifty percent of a film, at least. In some scenes it’s almost a hundred percent. It’s the thing that can add so much emotion to a film. It’s a thing that can add all the mood and create a larger world. It sets the tone and it moves things. Sound is a great “pull” into a different world. And it has to work with the picture – but without it you’ve lost half the film.”

- David Lynch in conversation with Larry Sider, Director of the highly recommended School of Sound (read the full interview on Lynch’s use of sound here)

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The Kraken Ceilidh band brought a marathon 7 hour Video Jam at Sounds from the Other City (Salford’s best new music festival) last night to a close with a good old knees up in Kings Arms pub. 

A quick dive into the VJ archives reveals them here, a good 2 years ago, scoring a film by WULF artist Neirin Best called ‘Tea Jim Noir’. If you’ll excuse the odd camera wobble and poor sound quality, this is quite rough and ready, charming stuff.

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in 2011 Bird’s Eye View festival* brought a one off programme to London’s Southbank Centre which screened four originally ‘silent’ films by women filmmakers (Hansel and Gretel (1955) by Lotte Reiniger, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) by Maya Deren, Suspense (1913) by Lois Weber and The Seashell and the Clergymen (1928) by Germain Dulac) scored live with new accompaniment written by four women musicians/sound artists (Micachu, Seaming, Tara-Jane Busch and Imogen Heap). 

Maya Deren’s work has been re-scored countless times. You’ll find a wealth of alternative sonic versions of Meshes of the Afternoon on YouTube (3 to start you off: here, here and here). I particularly like the one above from Seaming though, commissioned by BEV.

Sophie Mayer wrote a great article about the event and the art of the live score for Sound and Music here, in which she elaborates on these 4 pioneering women filmmakers:

“Each of the four filmmakers showcased in Sound and Silents was a pioneer aesthetically as well as by virtue of her gender: Lotte Reiniger made the oldest surviving animated feature film (The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926) using her patent technique based on Chinese silhouette animation and devising the first multi-plane camera (beating Walt Disney by several years) to obtain her effects. Maya Deren kick-started the American avant-garde, inventing alternatives to Hollywood not just in her poetic yet precise filmmaking (including inventive editing techniques), but through her brilliant theoretical writing and through establishing alternate channels of fundraising, exhibition and distribution. Lois Weber was the first woman to direct a feature film, in 1914; by 1916, she was Universal Studios’ highest paid director for her controversial social problem films. Germaine Dulac’s mysterious, lyrical experiments in cinema prefigured both Buñuel and the cinéma pur movement. Like Deren, she was an ardent theorist, critic and advocate of cinema as well as a filmmaker, working to create the context for art film in France.”

*Birds Eye View was an international film festival which aimed to throw a spotlight on the fact that only 7% of feature film directors at the time it founded (the early 2000′s) were women. Clearly there is work still to be done and it’s a true blow that the festival has now closed for financial reasons, though it continues its work in other avenues. 

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Lift to the Scaffold (or Elevator to the Gallows if you’re in the US), ‘the first movie of the French New Wave’ (Philip French), is on new release and has been touring cinemas in the UK. Its success has been largely attributed to a bleak score from Miles Davis, described by jazz critic Phil Johnson as "the loneliest trumpet sound you will ever hear, and the model for sad-core music ever since. Hear it and weep."

Incredibly, the music was improvised in its entirety during the course of a single night. Davis gave the musicians only a few rudimentary harmonic sequences he had assembled, and, once the plot was explained by its director Louis Malle, the band improvised without any precomposed theme, while edited loops of the musically relevant film sequences were projected in the background. Jason Wood (new film programmer for HOME in Manchester) notes in this article that ‘work continued from 10 at night until five in the morning, the music amounting to about 18 minutes in total in the film (a 2003 soundtrack reissue later compiled a further 40 minutes of out-takes), scored directly to screen.’

See a (brilliant) trailer for the film here. 

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Outer Space by Peter Tscherkassky 

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Next week (03/05/15), Video Jam returns to Sounds from the Other City - an eclectic festival of new music like none other which takes over the streets, cafes, pubs and churches of Salford every year. Casting my mind back to our debut this time last year, I was swiftly reminded of Miles Halpin’s highly inventive score for Cote D’Azur by Caroline Ward, which featured a bicycle xylophone and bicycle pump pipe. A true Video Jam gem.

See the event page for more details.

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Exciting news: sound and visual artist Christian Marclay has made a new audio-visual work, Fade to Slide. Extract above; info below (source here).

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Fade to Slide is the result of a commission for music ensemble Bang on a Can’s forthcoming double-disc multimedia project, Field Recordings (out May 12, 2015 on Cantaloupe Music).

"Field Recordings is a kind of ghost story," explains Bang on a Can Co-Founder David Lang. "We asked composers from different parts of the music world to find a recording of something that already exists—a voice, a sound, a faded scrap of melody—and then write a new piece around it. And so they did." In Marclay's case, the result was Fade to Slide. 

"Fade to Slide continues Christian Marclay’s exploration into the use of video to create a framework in which live music can develop," explains a press release. "Short fragments of films are edited into a rapid succession of events that the musicians use as a structure for their performance," meaning that the work's visuals are composed of clips from films, documentaries, TV shows, and more, cross- and match-cut into a free-form narrative. "The original soundtracks form a backing audio track," it continues. "The musicians are not asked to literally interpret on-screen actions, as in a foley studio, but let the images and audio prompt musical reactions to create a mimetic transposition between image and sound, as if one became the other." 

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Usaginingen are a Japanese duo based in Berlin who make live audio/visual performances using self built film and sound machines. I saw them perform at  Flatpack Film Festival in Birmingham and was struck by how refreshing it was to see a completely hands on and largely acoustic A/V show that wasn’t trying desperately to impress. The performance made bold and humorous connections between what is seen and heard in a way that seemed to connect with early Expressionist cinema.

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I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much by Pipilotti Rist. 

To be watched in full.

[I originally found this on ubu.com - an amazing, completely independent, unrivalled (and free) resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts.]

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“Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.” - Robert Bresson

Recently I came across a video essay on the Top 10 Best Sound Designed Films of All Time which introduced me to Robert Bresson’s film A Man Escaped. 

Godard wrote that "Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dosteovsky is the Russian novel." Tarkovsky describes Bresson as "perhaps the only artist in cinema who achieved the perfect fusion of the finished work with a concept theoretically formulated beforehand." Bresson’s style is expressed largely through his distinct use of sound and a sparing use of music. See this video essay for more on the subject.

His writing on film is fascinating and often poetic, the Notes on Cinematography being a prime example.

Robert Bresson - Notes on Sound 

What is for the eye must not duplicate what is for the ear.

If the eye is entirely won, give nothing or almost nothing to the ear.* One can not be at the same time all eye and all ear.

When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it. The ear goes more toward the within, the eye toward the outer.

A sound must never come to the help of a image, nor an image to help the of sound.

If a sound is the obligatory complement of an image, give preponderance either to the sound or to the image. If equal, they damage or kill each other, as e say of colors

Image and sound must not support each other, but must work each in turn through a sort of relay.

The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone ,makes the eye impatient. Use these impatiences. Power of the cinematographer who appeals to the senses in governable way. Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence

* And vice versa, if the ear is entirely won, give nothing to the eye.

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Occasionally I wish we’d made it a rule from the very beginning to document our events better. Video Jam is in its 4th year now. We’ve put on over 30 events, with an average of around 8 films per programme, each accompanied live by an original score. Give or take, that’s roughly 240 scores that have been commissioned and written for film since we began. These have been of wildly varying length, style and genre, from 1 minute to 40 minutes, incorporating iPhones, guitar orchestras, crystal mics, bicycles, opera, ceilidh, jazz bands and just about anything else you care to imagine. 

The nature of any live event is that it is ephemeral. The you had to be there thing is a quality in itself, but I do sometimes reflect on this huge non-existent archive of sound and music that has been created over the years. It remains no where to be found but erratically in a collection of wonderful films from Boz Hayward, who kindly documented our early events (most of these can be seen on his YouTube channel), a few sound recordings, and in our collective memory. 

Perhaps, however, in a certain way it would be a contradiction to meticulously preserve the fruits of this labour. Perhaps it is entirely fitting that the nature of our work remains ephemeral as, after all, Video Jam is an experiment. Our purpose in commissioning musicians to score or ‘re-score’ existing films is not in pursuit of perfection or to better any previous attempts, but to allow an individual unrelated to the original context of the film to enter into a discourse with it, to offer their personal interpretation and as a result re-awaken an audience’s perception of how sound and moving image relate to one another. 

The film above is one of the few works that has been preserved from previous events, which I will be sourcing and uploading here in the coming weeks and months as I reflect on all this. The film is Very Similar To by Alexander Stewart, who lives in Chicago, and the music was composed by Jonathan Holland. The piece was screened and scored live on 08/07/12. For a blast from the past, see the page for this event here.

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Paul Daly of WULF has made this truly wonderful 16mm film to accompany Lada, a track from Joe Snape’s brand new album Brittle Love. The piece marks a development of their collaboration following Spaces, a 3 part UK tour in 2014 of new film and live sound works commissioned and facilitated by Video Jam and Slip. 

"In its purist form, this film is a celebration of British culture and traditions. Western ways and the growth of technology has changed the way in which we live our lives rapidly over the last decade. Whilst change and growth is positive and inevitable, many things get forgotten and eventually become broken remnants of what they once were. This film is my little way of holding onto the things I grew up with before these places reside only in memories."                     - Paul Daly

'Brittle Love' [SLP010] is a suite of songs scratched together from the teary depths of a computerised pop dream. From a few raggedy Technicolor melodies bloom luscious strings, xylophones, and drum machines. But something’s not quite right: you can almost hear the sticky-tape holding together the synthesisers, the vocals are forever slipping away from the beat. This is pin-point electronic music put together with Early Learning Centre scissors, a pot of PVA glue, and a page of Lonely Hearts classifieds ripped from a regional newspaper. - Joe Snape

Find more about Brittle Love, the record from which Lada is the lead video, here:

http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2015/03/joe-snape/

https://bleep.com/release/57859-joe-snape-brittle-love.

Video: Paul Daly Titles: Neirin Best Music: Joe Snape - 'Lada' from 'Brittle Love' [SLP010] © S L I P 2015 slipimprint.co.uk

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Glasgow friends! The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), a silent film classic known for its pioneering use of close-up, is receiving a very special live accompaniment on Sunday 15th March at the Glasgow Concert Hall.

The film has received a variety of scores, from Nick Cave to J S Bach, but for for the first time this month will be accompanied by music from the fifteenth century - Joan of Arc’s time - which has been developed by the Orlando Consort. More info and tickets here.

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I recently saw this article on the 15 most innovative documentaries of the last 5 years; a more balanced and insightful read than a lot of similar lists you find clogging up the internet. It led me to discover that DIE HEXEN, a sound artist and all round polymath currently based in Belfast who I’ve worked with through Video Jam, has compiled a series of not-for-profit films taken from various sources for several of her sound works, one of which includes footage from Samsara (as featured on the aforementioned list.) This got me thinking again about the idea of ‘re-scoring’ film as touched on in the case of Drive last year. These film edits can be taken as complementary visuals to pieces of music or re-scorings of pre-existing material.

My favourite of the series so far is for the wonderful track ‘Siamese’ which is paired with Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome by the Kenneth Anger: watch here.

And here’s one more: ‘Gloomy Sunday’ paired with intensely dream-like moments in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia: watch here.

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Matthew Sweet’s Sound of Cinema is a regular programme on Radio 3 worth listening to. It doesn’t go into a huge amount of depth or analysis but offers a solid introduction to a variety of composers and always includes interesting bits of trivia.

The latest episode celebrates International Women’s Day. Sweet discusses certain films and their soundtracks in relation to the Bechdel test - a (somewhat flawed) test that seeks to uncover gender bias in a work of fiction by asking whether two or more women are depicted talking about something other than a man - as well as women composers, mostly contemporary. The episode opens with epic (and frankly, moving) music from Thelma and Louise and Sweet remarks that though it was made 25 years ago ‘it’s still the movie we’re likely to pick when called upon to name one in which women take the lead.’ 

The programme also features music from my favourite film of all time, Orlando (listen to an extract above; go and watch the film). The music was co-written by its director Sally Potter. 

Listen to the episode here.