Asides

sumitsays: This year’s #KineticaArtFair: more novelty automatons, fewer strange attractors

sumitsays: This year’s #KineticaArtFair: more novelty automatons, fewer strange attractors

I thought this year’s Kinetica Art Fair was a bit disappointing. Last year’s included a fair proportion of exhibits whose workings were mysterious and unpredictable – in other words, chaotic, in the mathematical sense. This year it all seemed a bit more… obvious. I’m not sure if that’s a fair reflection of the show, or just contempt bred by familiarity.

Here’s a little video I made in about two minutes showing some bits and pieces around the fair.

kinetica art fair 2011 from Sumit on Vimeo.

Black Swan: ballet + body horror

@sumitsays: Black Swan. If ballet + body horror = inspired, I’m looking forward to flamenco + splatter

I’ve mostly seen Black Swan described as a psychological thriller – a term that I’ve always understood to mean that the protagonist has to use their ingenuity and wits, rather than physical strength, to escape a situation, the threat of violence being more present than violence itself. (Wait Until Dark would be my canonical example.) Black Swan, however, is about a young woman’s descent into dysmorphic insanity. Almost every scene in this film is disturbing in a visceral sense (including those that reveal the phenomenal physical stresses associated with ballet): bodies are flexed, broken, torn up, destroyed and finally reshaped into unsettling new forms. So I’d say it owes more to “body horror” than “psychological thriller”.

Pigeon-holing aside, is it any good? Well, I enjoyed it, though it did lay it on pretty thick. Films that give the audience very few clues about what to believe run the risk of losing their emotional investment, and it would seem that’s the case for some of Black Swan‘s viewers. I found it easy enough to pin myself to the fate of Natalie Portman’s tormented prima ballerina; whether what’s she’s experiencing is “real” or not in some objective sense didn’t matter much to me. I enjoyed the structure, too, with the character’s arc mirroring that of the ballet she’s performing in; Aronofsky mashes it up enough that the ending is satisfyingly resonant rather than hokily obvious. (A personal irritation: Black Swan bears some striking similarities with a novel I plotted but never got round to writing about five years ago. Oh well.)

Incidentally, I’m not kidding about the flamenco-splatter movie. Someone do it. All those scarlet frills…



sumitsays: My Top 3 Weekly #lastfm artists: Clint Mansell (68), Alva Noto (19) & Terror Danjah (18) http://bit.ly/9YoOfe

sumitsays: My Top 3 Weekly #lastfm artists:

Clint Mansell (68) Black Swan, yes, but also Sahara
Alva Noto (19, via)
Terror Danjah (18, particularly this and this)

http://bit.ly/9YoOfe

Tweekly.fm isn’t actually working very well for me, because I mostly listen to individual tracks. So all it takes is for me to listen to an album a couple of times (or a couple of albums by the same artist) for the artist to make the top three, even if they weren’t my discovery of the week. Even more so if one of the albums – Sahara – is a soundtrack made up of 28 short tracks. May have to rethink…

the well-tempered icicle: frozen minimalism and joik bass

@sumitsays: the well-tempered icicle: frozen minimalism and joik bass @somersethouse

So on Sunday I went to see Norwegian musician Terje Isungset playing one of a series of half-hour concerts on musical instruments made entirely from ice. The concert was in a geodesic dome on the Thames-facing terrace of Somerset House, just big enough to include a small stage, the mixing desk and a couple of dozen audience-members. I think numbers were also kept low to avoid heating up the instruments – they’re clearly finely tuned and even slight melting would probably erode their sound. To that end, there was an “ice roadie” who took them out of coolboxes only for long enough to play a particular song; none of them remained out for the entire concert. He was apparently the same chap who carves the ice out of a frozen lake somewhere in northern Norway and had driven the instruments all the way to London for the shows.


For this reason, and because photography was forbidden during the actual concert, I can’t show you what the instruments actually looked like. They were all percussion except for a large wide-mouthed horn: dangling chimes, a marimba and cylindrical ice hammers used to extract a variety of sounds from ice blocks. Apparently stringed ice instruments have also been played at ice music festivals in Norway and Italy, but none were in evidence at the show I attended. Most of these made the kinds of sounds that you might expect: ethereal, fragile and pure – at least once they had been amplified using what looked like highly directional microphones. But there was one big surprise: an ice block with a thin flap carved out of one side to make a resonator that emitted a booming bass that would have made any dubstepper proud.

As to the music, a number of the pieces were based around repeated melodic figures and wordless vocals, inviting obvious comparisons to Philip Glass et al. But there was also a more trip-hoppy number (on which the bass block was put to good effect) complete with sing-song rap – it might not have actually been joik, but it was suitably evocative of the far north. So was much of the concert, in fact, though it was hard to tell if that was because of the ambience, the music or (most likely) the combination of the two. The final piece, which drew on samples from previous performances and the afore-mentioned horn, was more abrasive – on the noisy end of the ambient spectrum, culminating in a inchoate roar – a dramatic climax to an appropriately impermanent musical experience.

Here’s a short documentary clip about the making of the instruments and the music – mostly not in English, but it doesn’t really matter. There’s also an interview with Insungset on Radio 4’s Today programme here.

Icemusicfestival 2010 from Icemusic on Vimeo.