GOBLIN
PERFORM 'SUSPIRIA'
St.
Bartholomew's Church, Brighton, Sat Dec 6th
Disclaimer!Dario
Argento's 1977 shocker 'Suspiria' may be genuinely
deranged but its also literally depraved. It follows the standard
slasher film conventions, which includes repeated scenes of
semi-dressed women getting penetrated by knives and meeting other
grisly deaths. If given this description you're not interested in
being told such a film has other merits, or want to know about its
soundtrack, please skip this section now.
If after Pere Ubu's 'Man With the X-Ray Eyes' I'd rushed to proclaim
underscores as the way to create a film soundtrack, what should come
along a couple of weeks later but a classic example of an overscore?
But
then a conventional score would never have worked for a film such as
'Suspiria'. There's not so much a subtext that
needs drawing out. Just like the supernatural events that take over
the characters' lives, everything pretty much explodes over the
surface of the film. Argento realised that the horror of horror films
comes from the triumph of the irrational, and simply went with that.
Mysteries stay unexplained, plot threads are dropped with impunity -
your mind would break before it made any sense of this.
Instead it
lives in the mise-en-scene, the lurid colours and Art Nouveau
flourishes of the Dance Academy (which must count as one of the main
characters in its own right), and in the succession of dramatic
set-piece events. Everything becomes suffused in the atmosphere of a
lurid, surrealist dream. And it lives in the soundtrack which, rather
than illustrating the film, was composed before shooting began. And
music, inherently irrational in the way it runs a short-circuit to
your brain, is vital in achieving this effect.
Watching
sections of it performed during Goblin's solo gig earlier this year,
I wrote “it just keeps going, permeating the whole film –
marinading in its mood”. Yet, watching the whole thing through,
rather than listening to live highlights or the soundtrack album you
realise that however over-the-top it sounds its actually quite a
skilled accomplishment. For an overscore, there's a whole lot of
underscore to it – semi-subliminal embellishment of the events. And
the grand themes have a habit of suddenly cutting straight out,
leaving us hanging. The band are clearly aware how loud silence can
sound.
And
while its famous for being a rock score, repeating phrases and riffs
until insanity takes hold, it uses quite a few classical devices. The
main theme recurs again and again but in different variants, like
motifs in a symphony. The psychological effect is of relentlessness,
but without the ear ever getting the chance to become used to what
its hearing.
Perhaps
the most bizarre and effective thing about the soundtrack is that it
sounds simultaneously so fitting for the film and like some alien
force that is infecting it – like the sinister witch lurking at the
heart of the Dance Academy orchestrating the deaths. The celebrated
main theme, with those malevolently chanted vocals like a twisted
lullaby, simultaneously sinister and seductive, fits superbly with
Argento's directoral motifs – such as filming scenes from an
elevated perspective, as if under the spying eye of evil spirits.
The
'rock' nature of the soundtrack is similarly bizarre and disruptive
in the way it works. The film is at root a supernaturalised analogy
for the generation gap – an ode to getting out of school and going
your own way. The witch at the heart of it all, Helena Markos, is not
just ancient but supposed to be dead - she has prolonged her life by
supernatural means. (Whether she is sustained by the frequent blood
sacrifices of the young, like Countess Dracula, is one of the many
things which remain unexplained.) The heroine Suzy (played by Jessica
Harper) can't trust anyone much over thirty and only seems to gain
safe haven outside of the Academy - in more modern settings, such as
the glass-and-steel citadel of the conference centre. The Academy
often seems designed around infantalising it's young adult charges.
(Argento designed the sets so, for example, door handles were raised
to the height they would normally be for children.)
But
the rock soundtrack, which would have sounded so modern to a
contemporary audience at a time when they were only starting to move
from classical instrumentation, isn't the stereotypical sound of
youth or freedom. It very much belongs with the Dance Academy, like
an aural iteration of the witch's spells. While, in a break with one
of the more fundamental rules of soundtracks, Suzy isn't given her
own theme. If anything it is playing with the notion more commonly
held by older generations, that rock is the “devil's music”.
I
also wrote after last time “the best way to experience their music
is still through watching those Argento films”. And I was right.
Cutting out the proggier solo-band stuff, and showing their music
against the film it was always meant to accompany, this was Goblin in
their element. And the grandeur of St. Barts church made for the
perfect venue. “I hope God forgives us”, front-man Claudio
Simonetti commented at the end. I reckon he will.
From
their earlier performance in Islington:
GODFLESH
The
Haunt, Brighton, Tues 9th Dec
After
an eight-year break, it would almost be tempting to talk about
Godflesh being resurrected. I loved the legendary Eighties noise band
enough to name one of my old comic strips after them. (Though if
anyone else remembers that I'll be astonished.) And now they're not
just back but back the way they were – the classic two-man line-up
of guitarist Justin Broadrick and bassist GC Green.
Though
just looking at the musicians on stage perhaps overlooks the key
ingredient to their distinctive sound. By then many bands
employed a drum machine, but tended to use it as a click track.
After all, if the drums are important then you invest in a real
drummer, right? Whereas Godflesh took the drum machine and utilised
it. At times it became the dominant instrument, providing an
onslaught of inhumanly pounding beats, relentless as rows of space
invaders, with guitar and bass throwing up dissonances.
It
was a sound which gave the band the best of both worlds – the
frenzied energy of punk combined with the pulverising force of metal.
Plus, in an echo of something I once said about Wolf Eyes, the way
you couldn't understand a word of those screamed or guttural vocals
just added to the sense they were speaking to you. They seemed to tap
into some feeling beyond words, something purely existential – the
glossolalia of angst. (I manage to make out precisely three words all
night long - “towers of emptiness.”)
As
ever its more evocative to let the music do the talking, stirring
moods and conjuring up images in your mind. Wikipedia tags the band with the terms 'industrial metal', 'experimental metal' and post-metal'. And taking that first suggestion it's music
which could be taken to follow the industrial template – a response
to the urban environment, to tower blocks, traffic jams and tasting
smog for air. As Dom Lawson said in the Guardian of their sound: “monochrome
riffs and dehumanised drums collide, conjuring a disorientating fog
of urban desperation and fury… a cracked prism of post-Thatcher
social alienation.”
But
it also morphs readily into visions of some science fiction
apocalypse. Early albums tended to credit the drums to the
'Terminator'-like tag “machines”. Bu they're
less man vs. machine wars and more the cyborg-as-inner-conflict of
'Tetsuo' - man becoming machine even as he fights
it, and vice versa. But the real appeal is the way one slips so
easily into the other, as if the dystopian future is already here and
just getting warmed up. (Think of that last 'Terminator'
film taking place almost entirely inside some future apocalypse. What
made it more epic also made it more removed, less involving. What's
powerful is the sense of an elision between the two.)
In
some ways they're the Black Flag of metal, and not just through being
influential. There's the same sense of stripping down beyond the
point a sane mind would stop, reducing music to a brutal and
brutalising force. But there's the equal yet contradictory sense that
it's all a brilliant art project, devised by some very smart people
indeed. The slide show that accompanies the gig includes raging
flames and venomous snakes, but also such arty fayre as Church
carvings and details from Bosch paintings.
There's
that wish fulfilment conceit common in comics, where the nerdy kid
gains super powers and no-one can pick on him any more. With Godflesh
there's the sense that their outsiderness is their
superpower, the quality that enables them to unleash such sonic
blasts, that everything that's pushing down on them is made into
their weapon back against it. Ultimately, for all it's savagery,
there's something not nihilistic but liberating about their music.
It's like facing off the world and winning.
They
only play for about an hour, which might seem on the short side. But
the experience is of such an intensity you're not really sure if you
could have taken much more. As it ends someone sticks on a Christmas
jingle single, so we exit to the echoes of blistering beats and
service-encounter session singers wishing us a merry festive season.
They
really are just as good now as they were back in the day.
Their
classic 'Streetcleaner' from Maryland...
THE
EX
Sticky
Mike's Frog Bar, Brighton, Wed 10th Dec
“I
have satellite maps of near destinations
So
why take a risk when you can take a vacation?”
Much
like Swans, I've already written about Dutch post-punkers the Ex not once but twice (actually sort of three times) so will only add stuff here which I haven't
said before.
One
cool thing about this gig, a warm-up for a two-night residency in
London's Cafe Oto, was that it featured such a wealth of support acts
it almost became a mini-festival. These included (and I may well have
missed something)...
- A Dutch singer-songwriter who gave us precisely one song in English
- Afework Nigussie, a traditional Ethiopian musician playing what appeared to be a bedpost with a single string attached (and later joined the band for a few numbers)
- Terrie from the Ex playing freeform impro guitar (which alas only really got good towards the end)
- Trash Kit, a Slits-style girl group playing offbeat in about every available sense of the word. When I say girl group they looked like their collective ages might have got them served at the bar. The singer dedicates one song to her mum, who turns out to be in the audience.
As
befits a band not knowing for resting on their laurels, the Ex
provide several new tracks which would bode well for the future.
Katherina's skittering drumming provided a fine contrasts to
Godflesh's machine beats a few nights before, in that it couldn't
sound any more human. While the guitars are taunt and sharp, she
provides rolling polyrhthms which, as I've said before “rarely
march in the lockstep of punk orthodoxy.”
Gigs,
even good gigs, fall too easily into a formula. While this was a
night which felt full of of possibility. The main set ended with a
version of ‘That’s Not A Virus’ which
reached such an intensity, de Boers spitting doggerel number codes
like they were the most important information ever imparted, that I
expected cracks to start appearing in the walls and ceiling and
Sticky Mike's Frog Bar to be no more. After which the band were
clapped back on for no less than three encores.
The
Ex are neither stuck in some fundamentalist punk furrow, struggling
to retain the way everything sounded in 1979, nor have they bought
into music biz shenanigans. They simply play the music it occurs to
them to play. They're stuck to their roots, but they've also grown
from them. If they didn't exist we'd probably have to make them up.
'Four
Billion Tulip Bulbs',a subject close to every Dutch
person's heart, from Copenhagen...
EMPTYSET
A/V
Dome
Studio Theatre, Brighton, Sat 13th Dec
Emptyset, it says here, “examine the physical
properties of sound through electromagnetism, architecture and
process-based image-making in a live event that encompasses
performance, installation work and audio-visuals.”
People
often perceive electronica as a remote, austere and and cerebral
affair. But Emptyset are a long way from Morton Subotnik's 'music of
the spheres', their spectral sounds are actually quite rooted in the
earth. I once commented how psychedelia “worked best when stuffed
inside actual songs. It's the way it then fights to get out, makes
the song strange, misshapen and unpredictable. Like one of those
giant bubbles which stop being perfectly round but undulate weirdly
and throw up loads of odd reflections.”
And
Emptyset do a similar thing with the rhythms of dance music. As the
visuals play with geometric shapes and with distortions, so their
music plays with the even-ness of beats. And strange, distorted beats
are still beats, dance music from Mars is still dance music. There
were sections the audience could easily have danced to, were we not
so chinstrokey. And in fact I read later they “have backgrounds within Bristol's club
music scene.”
The
A/V in their name and in their performance suggests the appeal of
synaesthesia. See a live band and you may enjoy the interplay
between, say, the bassist and the drummer. But when that jumps across
media barriers it becomes environmental. It was reminiscent less of
other gigs that I've been to than Lis Rhodes' Tate installation 'Light Music'. At times the bass
notes rumbled so low they made the floor vibrate and tickle my feet.
Both
electronica and dance music become more immersive the longer they
continue, and the same was true here. Not because things developed.
Though they performed one long piece, it was pretty much neatly
divided into sections. But because its immersive. You settle into it
like a bath.
From
Paris:
Coming soon! Short of Led Zeppelin staging a surprise reunion on the seafront on Xmas Day, no more gig-going adventures for a little while. Still, it's been a good year for it...
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