BBC FOUR focuses on one of England’s truly unique and underrated bands - The Fall - in this special documentary. One of the most enigmatic, idiosyncratic and chaotic garage bands of the last 30 years, The Fall are led by the belligerent and poetic Mark E Smith. The band grew out of the fringe of the Manchester punk scene and to date have released in excess of three dozen albums, toured relentlessly, inspired two successful stage plays, recorded 24 Peel Sessions and performed with contemporary ballet dancer Michael Clarke, along with various spoken word events. All this has happened under the guidance of Smith with various line-ups currently totalling over 40 different members. They have never conformed to fashion or musical trends and when asked why they were his favourite band, John Peel replied: “They are always different, they are always the same.” This is the first time that Mark E Smith has agreed to the story being told on television and he, along with many of the major players, takes us through this unique English rock ‘n’ roll story. Their rollercoaster story is told alongside footage of their most recent and sadly now last Peel Session recorded in August at the legendary BBC Maida Vale studios. There is also film of John playing out the session at Peel Acres a week later. Contributors include past and present band members including Marc Riley, Una Baines, Steve Hanley, Ben Pritchard and Eleni Smith plus thoughts from key fans and critics including Paul Morley, Tony Wilson, Stewart Lee, promoter Alan Wise, original Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon and Franz Ferdinand.
cá está o torrent: http://www.greylodge.org/gpc/?p=346
I noticed my own heart beating, breath passing through my nostrils, My feet walking, eyes seeing. —Allen Ginsberg, “On the Cremation of Chögyam Thungpa Vidyadhara”
I was lost, and the cost, and the cost didn’t matter to me. I was lost, and the cost was to be outside society. —Patti Smith, “Rock and Roll Nigger”
“I was born in Chicago, mainline of America, in the center of a blizzard after World War II.” Biographical fact, yes, but so elliptical and so visceral in its phrasing, Patti Smith’s birth here links culture, history, and weather—like she’s some fantastic force come to earth to surprise us all. This notion is reinforced throughout Patti Smith: Dream of Life, a film and art installation and photography book 11 years in the making. Now playing at New York’s Film Forum, Steven Sebring’s documentary opens with the artist’s self-narration—her siblings’ arrivals, the family’s move to the City of Brotherly Love—over images of running, red-lit horses (of course), followed by footage from a train window, apartment buildings and train tracks and traffic. “Life is an adventure of our own design,” she says, “intersected by fate and a series of lucky and unlucky accidents.”
Dream of Life follows her adventure, specifically after her career started again. She had already lived in New York, worked and lived with Robert Mapplethorpe and Sam Shepard, and recorded seminal punk rock albums in 1974 and ‘75,) when she met Fred Sonic Smith. In 1979, they moved to Detroit, his “beloved Detroit,” where they began raising their two children, Jackson and Jesse. It was only when Fred and then her brother Todd died suddenly, that Smith even considered returning to a public life. To support her family and encouraged by Allen Ginsberg ("Let go of the spirit of the departed and continue your life’s celebration), in 1995 she brought her children back east and began performing on stage again. “Shaking off the performance dust,” she says, “and saying hello to the road.”
As Smith narrates this decision, the movie shows her emerging from a car pulling an Airstreamer, hardly your average camper. Like much of the footage assembled for the film—and again, she and Sebring collaborated on the project for a decade—this image is at once oddly ceremonial, appositely punk, and utterly self-knowing. The film is suffused with Smith’s sense of irony, outrage, and loss, and it is shaped according to her changing sense of self, her dedication to her kids, her constant political commitments. Smith frames her story as an junction of experiences: “Life isn’t some vertical or horizontal line,” Smith observes. “You have your own interior world and it’s not neat, therefore the importance and beauty of music, sound, noise, when you go outside and walk on the street.”
These worlds exist across space and time. When she revisits Detroit, photos show Smith immersed in her young family (pregnant, leaning into Fred, entranced by a sleeping infant), Sebring’s camera takes you through the old house, revealing dishes in a sink, children’s handprints on otherwise empty walls, a home abandoned now but dense with memories. As Smith makes her way down a stairwell or gazes out windows, the soundtrack offers “The Jackson Song”: “When day is done and little dreamers spin, / First take my hand, now let it go.”
Loss is a persistent theme in the film, considered in various dimensions. She visits Blake’s and Gregory Corso’s graves (“‘Remember you are mortal,’ said Gregory, ‘but poetry is not’"), compares photos of Baghdad’s Golden Dome Mosque, before and after the U.S. invasion ("What are we doing in Iraq?"), and describes her own “alteration” since her brother’s death: “My heart went from feeling like a cold black ember to a warm really joyful flame,” she says, “All his finest qualities somehow entered me as a human being.”
As the camera follows Smith and her band on the road (including shows in Tokyo, London, Paris, and Atlanta), it also returns again and again to the city that seduced her. Remembering her early days in New York, she touches on people (William Burroughs, “our guardian angel") and places (CBGB), the film illustrating briefly as she skips from one recollection to another. “New York,” a decades-younger Smith recites, “is the thing that formed me, New York is the thing that deformed me, New York is the thing that perverted me, New York is the thing that converted me… It’s my little prayer for New York.” The city is here less a place than a point of perpetual departure. And the film, despite Smith’s own date-pocked narration, is hardly chronological, but rather, a lyrical construction of moments—black and white or color, crisp or grainy, posed or apparently improvised—pieces and connections rather than conclusions.
This shifting portrait assumes viewers’ assumptions and filters, doesn’t impose a reading. Rather, it slinks and shimmies, stops and starts, provokes and seduces. Just so, Smith comes in and out of frame, each actual place a repository and occasion. When she enters her “corner,” a room in the Chelsea Hotel to which the film returns more than once, the image focuses on black boots first, then tips up to show the camera hanging from her neck. Pans of the room show accumulating memories: photos (Ralph Nader, for whom she campaigned in 2000), wooden clogs, books (Walt Whitman, Mickey Spillane, William Blake, Rimbaud), and her instruments. She found in rock and roll, she says, a means to express herself, “albeit somewhat awkwardly.”
Modest and even shy offstage, Smith is famously explosive on it. The film’s concert footage is occasionally overlaid with alternate soundtracks (Smith reading poems), but always makes clears her uncanny charisma. “My mission,” Smith says, “is to communicate, to wake people up, to give them my energy and to suck theirs.” Just so, her recent performances include calls to action against the current U.S. administration. In Philadelphia, she reads from the Declaration of Independence ("a long train of abuses") in order to “indict George W. Bush for befouling our country’s name.” On the DC Mall, she sings “Radio Baghdad,” from her 2004 CD Trampin’ ("Suffer not the paralysis of your neighbor, / Suffer not, but extend your hand"), as the film shows an anti-war collage.
Smith’s journeys are by turns intimate and indistinct, comic (a bit with Flea on a beach, comparing stories of pissing into bottles) and spiritual (she walks with Jesse through Central Park as she remembers the song “She Walked Home,” which she wrote but never recorded because, she says, “Somehow Fred made it his own"). As much as this collaborative film reveals of Smith, it never tries to define her or even make her its only focus. Instead, it takes her at her word: “We all have a voice. We have a responsibility to exercise it, to use it.”
by Cynthia Fuchs PopMatters Film and TV Editor
Patti Smith: Dream of Life Director: Steven Sebring Cast: Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, Oliver Ray, Tony Shanahan, Jay Dee Daughterty, Jackson Smith, Jesse Smith, Tom Verlaine, Sam Shepard, Phillip Glass, Benjamin Smoke, Michael Stipe, Flea
é... temos sempre aqui o torrent a cair no desktop: http://www.mininova.org/tor/1339304
Beautiful Losers Beautiful Losers is a feature documentary film celebrating the independent and D.I.Y. spirit that unified a loose-knit group of American artists who emerged from the underground youth subcultures of skateboarding, graffiti, punk rock and hip-hop. This documentary tells the story of how a group of outsiders with little or no formal training and almost no conception or interest of the inner workings of the art world ended up having an incredible impact on the worlds of art, fashion, music, film and pop culture.
e cá está ele, o novo dos the act-ups. roque ende role cheio de brilhantina, muscles cars, tatuagem no peito, miúdas com cabelos altos. a história é sempre a mesma, 50s blues, southern rock, rockabilly revival. punk garajeiro, directo. a voz de nick nicotine é fogo posto combinado com um fuzz de 70s. tudo isto com uma sonoridade gun club, electric eels, hank williams, reverend horton heat, comets on fire, kid congo. portanto a formula é o roque ende role. é dar, baralhar de novo e distribuir o espírito movido a gasolina com hábitos de whisky. isto tudo em vinil pela gigantesca editora groovie records .
e a aproveitar a vinda destes west coast healers pela mão da zdb, se vires o cêntimo apanha.o ... são uma questão de ocasião e interesse, estas sucessivas edições da dfa e congéneres. aglutinação de folquelore, pop, palminhas, vozes miudas, dança. é tudo pop. analógico. pop muito visual. é o inchaço americano. é um disco feito com os cêntimos no chão. portanto: 3 bolas de berlim em 5 possíveis.
para a primeira parte, e daqui vai metade do bilhete para a entrada, calhau! duo de grigg-skjellerup e portugal. ruído para audiências estáticas. do melhor. rejeitemos o signo chinês, criemos o signo português.
golden triangle [website] are a raucous, female-fronted brooklyn garage-punk act with a bratty attitude and stylish costumes that resemble some kind of performance art cabaret band. their hypnotic drumming, vocal chants and lofi guitars are just notes from chaos but always exactly where they need to be.
[600 pressed; 500 black vinyl, 100 gold vinyl] rob house records
NEW ALBUM OUT NOW There aren’t very many bands that have been together longer than The Fall and, with a few exceptions, it’s difficult to think of any who, like The Fall, have released brand new material every year. Formed at the height of the punk rock movement in Manchester in 1976, The Fall has released around 50 singles, 25 studio albums and perhaps 50 live and compilation albums. Famously the band has gone through numerous personnel changes over the years (there have been over 30 different line-ups so far) but always present is the enigmatic Mark E. Smith – musical genius, obnoxious drunk, Salford’s finest poet, journalist’s worst nightmare, working class hero. Dubbed ‘The Grumpiest Man in Pop’, by the NME, Mark E. Smith has been carving his jaundiced signature on the music scene for the past twenty plus years. Rarely tempted to celebrate the lighter side of life, Smith uses humour and horror to illuminate vile hypocrisies and injustices. It’s now over a year since the release of the critically acclaimed Fall Heads Roll and with a new line-up now in place, Fall aficionados everywhere have been looking forward, with a degree of impatience, to the next album. At last a date has been set for the release of Reformation Post TLC, The Fall’s stunning new work, which is yet another winner and set to supersede the success of Fall Heads Roll. What they are saying about 'Reformation Post TLC': “The end result is probably the best Fall album since the Halcyon days of This Nations Saving Grace and Hex Enduction Hour, another worth addition to the guys track record” (The Independent) “No matter how often he's written off, Smith keeps bouncing back.” (The Times) “It doesn't really sound like anything the Fall have done before, which bodes well for the future. As the stoic Fall fan knows, you write them off at your peril.”.” (The Guardian)
Vários Artistas - «Sonic Scope 2008» CD Grain of Sound € 12.95 É sempre uma ocasião importante quando temas nas mãos uma edição que é inteiramente feita por portugueses, em Portugal e que reflete uma realidade bela, dura e crua sobre a música experimental e improvisada actual. Nuno Moita e João Vicente da editora merecem a nossa confiança e a Fonoteca Municipal de Lisboa o aplausa por apoiar a iniciativa. Desde 2001 que o Festival Sonic Scope se vai afirmando, mas julgo que só este ano é que teve direito a documento em CD. Destaque para 9 participações, desde os One-Off a Sei Miguel, passando por os Curia, Plan, Red Trio, Whit, Carlos Pereira, Feltro e a «vaquinha» entre Vitor Joaquim eos @c. É sempre uma ocasião importante quando, disponibilizando o nosso precioso tempo, podemos ouvir um disco assim.
Estreia nacional da que é “uma das figuras mais fascinantes da música do século XX” (e dos dias de hoje), e provavelmente o homem que levou a solidão e isolamento no processo de trabalho aos maiores extremos em toda a história conhecida da música independente. Eremita, compositor de canções de abandono, entropia e superação, é editado pela misteriosa Corwood Industries desde o final dos anos 70 e, dezenas de discos e quase 30 anos depois de arrancar a carreira, apresentou-se pela primeira ao mundo (sem nunca ter dado entrevistas, sem nunca ter comunicado com os media em discurso directo) num concerto em Glasgow, em 2004, onde não vinha sequer listado. Desde então realiza um número bastante limitado de actuações por ano, pelo que é um enorme prazer anunciarmos que a Filho Único e a Fundação de Serralves, em co-produção, irão apresentar um concerto deste criador incomparável. Na véspera, a 9 de Janeiro, a Fundação de Serralves irá projectar o filme “Jandek On Corwood” (Chad Friedrichs, 2003), documentário sobre a carreira do artista à época nunca avistado.
e lá continua o doc lisboa sempre de pé. sem parar em semáforos e sem hesitar em bifurcações. os documentários portugueses continuam sem aparecer. sabe.se lá porquê.
depois do concerto de domingo dia 5 (ontem) no museu do chiado e depois de devorar o disco, compreendo agora como lisboa é uma selva. autocarros suados e peganhentos, equatoriais. é o português africano que podia também representar no downtown 81. gala drop descobre.se com sombras de nova iorque de 79.80.81. quem não ouve aqui liquid liquid e mesmo a banda de basquiat, gray? ou até mesmo os loosers, ou klaus schulze em tons tropicais. uma boa banda sonora para uma cidade sem a sua.
Os Lobster intitulam-se power-rangers do noise rock, mas ao contrário dos super-heróis, Guilherme Canhão e Ricardo Martins não possuem super-poderes; isto pelo menos se considerarmos que a química que os une não é em si um super-poder. Cansaram-se de combater o crime e nos últimos tempos incendiaram palcos sempre que para isso tiveram oportunidade; não só em Portugal, mas também em Espanha e em França. Fizeram mossa desde os primeiros tempos, transformaram-se rapidamente numa das melhores bandas portuguesas ao vivo e agora havia que dar um passo decisivo e corajoso em frente."Sexually Transmitted Electricity" é o primeiro bilhete de identidade da dupla depois de algumas licenças prévias que ficaram para a história. (...) é um documento que apanha os Lobster no seu melhor momento. Não chegou tarde nem cedo; chegou mesmo a horas. Tamanha urgência merecia um disco assim – uma estreia mais do que notável.www.myspace.cpm/wearelobsters
Acabadinhos de lançar "Misuse of Muscle's Appliance", esta é a segunda visita dos Ideas For Muscles à galeria ZDB. Afirmam-se como um power duo destrutivo e psicadélico a ter muito em conta, e mostram-nos que o rock ainda pode conseguir soltar faisca. Munido de ritmos programados, vozes em delay, suor rock'n'roll, psicadelismo afro-beat, apresentam neste novo ep um re-inventar da fórmula apresentada no seu primeiro Fuck the Trainer (edição de autor). O método de trabalho utilizado no registo de estreia baseado em encontrar ordem no caos, é aqui "invertido". Em Misuse of Muscle's Appliance o desafio foi destruir a ordem criada pelas composições inicialmente orientadas para o formato "canção". Disco duro, espontâneo e aventuroso. Os concertos são curtos e directos, convidam à diluição dos corpos e à comunhão etérea.www.myspace.com/ideasformuscles
If music were baseball, the departure of Blixa Bargeld from the Bad Seeds to focus exlusively on Einstürzende Neubauten would be considered one of the greatest front office moves of all time, one of those that leaves both squads better. Since Bargeld left in 2004, both his and Nick Cave’s band have put out some of the best music of their long careers. It freed Cave to tap into his rocker roots; the difference between Abbatoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus and Nocturama is so drastic that the only link is Cave’s voice - and allowed Bargeld to focus his efforts solely on Neubauten and its vision of what music should be. And that vision happens to include reshaping the way the audience and the artist interact. Their last album, Alles Wieder Offen, was funded by fan subscriptions, and this album actually started its life as bonus material for said subscribers. And while the Neubauten website still makes no reference to this album as a physical unit (only as a digital download), it does document its release, track-by-track, between March 2006 and February 2007. Unlike the songs on Alles, which was deliberately worked on and revised over that same span, those collected in The Jewels were all made quickly, in a day or two at most. And, in the grand tradition of Brian Eno, they built each track around the results of a card game based on neglected ideas from previous albums. Each band member would take a couple cards, grab an instrument or instruments (defined as loosely as possible, in that way only they can) and start playing. The remarkable part is that, when you listen to it, there is no hint of its diverse origins. The album is that coherent. The material itself is, unsurprisingly, pretty close to that of Alles, just with a little less menace. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nearly impossible for Neubauten to not be menacing or imposing, but the eerie factor seems to be ratcheted down just a tad. There are still plenty of moments of dark ambience, crashing metal and rustling construction supplies, like the horror film clamor of “Mei Ro” and “Die Libellen,” but they are mere elements of songs, balanced out by snatches of melody, almost-calming drones, and a sense of pacing that makes them feel almost natural. Plus they are joined by the lovely melodicism of “Ich Komme Davon,” “Jeder Satz mit Ihr Hallt Nach,” and “Am I Only Jesus?” and the call-and-response of “Magyar Energia,” which at least partially subvert any menace hidden in the background. And “Epharisto” is about as close as Neubauten gets to Tom Waits, with its limping groove, off-kitler guitar and Bargeld’s random vocal interjections. The songs are all relatively short for recent Neubauten material - the average length is just over 2 minutes - so there is little space for the sweeping builds and flowing forms that characterize so much of their output. In a way, this album ends up occupying a space half-way in the early ’80s and half-way in the present. It almost makes for a great summation of what Bargeld and Co. are all about. What’s really fascinating is that, while Neubauten doesn’t have the immediate rock’n’roll punch of recent Nick Cave, both groups seem to be starting from the same place: noise. As Emerson Dameron says in his review of Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, the latest Nick Cave record is also largely built around “scrapes and rattles,” mostly from Warren Ellis. And while it would be impossible to confuse one group for the other, it’s an interesting parallel, and perhaps speaks to why Cave hired Bargeld in the first place. By Dan Ruccia -dusted magazine
é um documentário possível do senhor. e é com todo o respeito que o vemos a falar para a camara enquanto se barbeia, ou quando pratica o seu ioga. o documento necessário para entender o mais prolífero artista inglês. este dvd arranja.se na vynil experience, ali no bairro alto. aqui fica o resumo noutra língua.
This is a great introduction to the work of this multi-talented songwriter, artist and poet. It opens with a conversation over an aborted move project which is a gentle introduction into the nature of Childish's character. The documentary shows him inking woodblock prints as the interviewer asks about his abused past. Childish's responses show the value of the psychotherapy he's received over the years and its easy to see why he's dropped the moniker "Wild Billy Childish" as he offers thoughtful, composed answers. There's plenty of music to pacify the fans of his band's various incarnations suhc as Thee Headcoats, Thee Milkshakes and most recently Musicians of the British Empire. Throughout his dress sense and epic moustache hark back to the Edwardian era and its easy to see why his work will stand the test of time, as opposed to someone like Tracey Emin. Childish will always be remembered for being her one-time boyfriend, though its easy to see where true genius lies!
