'UNDER THE SKIN' WITH LIVE SOUNDTRACK
BY MICA LEVI
Brighton Dome, Sun 7th May
Plot spoilers afoot
Science fiction is forever heading off
for alien planets which on closer inspection turn out to be rather
Earth-like. There'll be silver jump-suits or plastic protuberances on
people's foreheads or something, but beneath the dressing it will all
be analogous to the Middle East crisis or Brexit or something.
Jonathan Glazer's 'Under The
Skin' (2013), conversely, presents the Earth through alien
eyes. The rather abstract opening scene turns out to represent her
eye being formed, accompanied by a barely annunciating voice-over as
if she's learning human speech in real time. And from there an alien
Scarlett Johansson (unnamed, as are almost all the other characters)
sees shopping centres and streetlights as she never has before. While
surreal SF sequences are also in the mix, much of it looks like a
low-key documentary, as if a fly-on-the-wall team were accompanying
her for her first few days on Earth. (And some of the street scenes
were shot with hidden cameras.)
Her annunciated RP English contracts
with the broad Scottish accents sported by most others. This is
intended not only to distance her from them, but suggest at a
non-accent, like the modulated service encounter speech in 'Anomalisa'. (I'm not sure how much we do see RP as a neutral non-accent these
days, but go with it.)
The film works with the
space-femme-fatale, date-rape-in-reverse conceit, familiar from such
salacious fare as 'Species'. But this alien
framing reverses that reversal, largely through the alien remaining
our protagonist. When we see her pick up and devour her victims, we
neither sympathise with or condemn them. In fact we tend to regard
them as dispassionately as she does, simply because she does. There's
a snippet of a radio report of a body being found. But there's no
police investigation, no backstory to the other characters.
Of course it's common for characters to
be given a theme in soundtracks, which can even be labelled as such.
But in Mica Levi's score, here supplied live, the alien's theme
pretty much is the soundtrack. It seems to operate
at an angle to consensus reality. A frequent feature is different
lines which seem to work at different speeds to one another, like
planes crossing in an abstract painting. The slow-heartbeat drum
pattern should anchor the microtonally shifting strings, but actually
adds to the disorientation. It conveys a strange sense of suspension
and weightlessness, visually matched by the empty black void her
captives find themselves floating in.
But, appropriately for a character who
lures her victims, there's simultaneously something siren-like about
it. The soundtrack pulls you into watching as surely as she attracts
her victims, it's both her theme and her seduction tape. Levi lists it's influences as “Giacinto Scelsi, Iannis Xenakis
and John Cage… these big, music-changing composers. But I also took
a lot of inspiration from strip-club music and euphoric dance as
well.... It does sound creepy, but we were going for sexy.” It's
effective enough to fall confidently silent for long periods,
yielding to extemporised speech or simply ambient sounds. In fact
it's so effective in placing a destabilising filter over everything,
it is hard to imagine the film without it. It may even be integral,
the film needed precisely this soundtrack to work.
From a previous viewing, I had imagined
the alien gave up her hunting after encountering the man with the
facial disfigurement. And there is the scene where she sees her own
face in the mottled mirror, briefly de-beautified like his, shortly
followed by him legging it across a field. But on re-watch this is
actually seeded much earlier, and chiefly represented by her fall in
the street.
Because fall it is. One possible
interpretation of the film is that it's the helmeted guys on
motorcycles who are the actual aliens, and she's a construct they
create to harvest humans for them. Hence we see her being built at
the start. The ant she finds isn't the first Earth creature she sees,
it's the first thing she sees. In which case Pinnochio's plan to
become a boy turns out to be a hopeless dream. When she attempts to
become human she's unable to connect to anything, wandering without
speaking with an almost catatonic expression. Even if you can swap
your skin, you can't change your spots. The film pessimistically
defines us all as either predator or prey. When she is assaulted
herself her attacker even uses her MO, with seemingly aimless chat
including the vital question “are you on your own?”
GEORGE CRUMB'S 'BLACK ANGELS'
St. Nicholas' Church,
Brighton, Fri 5th May
The Ligeti Quartet's programme of
contemporary American and American-derived music is part of the
'Listen America' series staged by Music Of Our
Time.
John Zorn's opening piece 'Cat
O'Nine Tails' did make for an uphill start to the evening.
As it careered crashingly round multiple musical styles, it seemed
fragmented for fragmented's sake. It was like having a box of jigsaw
pieces thrown over you, as if you were expected to assemble them,
only to find they came from completely different sets. (And by chance
I'd been listening to 'The Faust Tapes' before
attending, so should if anything have been primed for collage music.)
I suppose we need to respect Zorn, but I'm not sure that's a reason
to actually listen to him.
Things thankfully scaled up from there
in the listenability stakes. I particularly liked Earle Browne's
String Quartet, not a composer I was previously at all familiar with.
Like many others from the programme Browne uses non-standard musical
notation, which was projected on a screen as the quartet played. And
it became part of the fun trying to figure how such strange abstract
art could possibly be read as a score. He certainly utilized the
non-standard notation to create some non-standard sounds from such
standard instruments. A reliable source of gossip claims two of his main influences are Alexander
Calder's sculptures and Jackson Pollock's paintings.
Aaron Copland's 'Rondino'
was introduced as representing optimism, and made a change from some
of the more challenging works. It's odd the way people will use
“American” like it automatically acts as a diss term in art.
Copland's big, bold strokes, so evocative of wide open spaces, seem
quintessentially American. But it's an optimism which feels not just
genuine but involving.
Of all the pieces George Crumb's
'Black Angels' was the only one to extend the
natural timbres of the instruments with treatment, to the extent the
quartet pulled the sound technician on stage for the applause. But
they also chant out (naming numbers in various languages) and calmly
walk away from their patented instruments to take to gongs and wine
glasses. In fact it had some of the ritualised feeling of fellow
classic Sixties composition Cardew's 'Great Learning', if not the same communalism.
The sections are divided into movements
titled 'Departure', 'Absence' and 'Return',
and the music follows a palindromic structure, suggesting a literal
musical journey intended to be transformative for player and
listener. The subhead “thirteen images from a the dark land”
refers to the troubled America of the late Sixties, with Crumb
commenting “there were terrible things in the air... they found
their way into 'Black Angels'.” But in it's way
it's less a reflection of events than an offer of a means to work
them out. It's optimism is less breezily open than Copland's, more
placed at the end of difficult terrain, but it's there.
It's a tidy twenty minutes long, but is
so sonically rich and dense that it feels longer. (In, you know, a
good way.) Each of those thirteen 'images' is itself so swiftly run
through you need to struggle to keep up. Having previously mentioned
'Faust Tapes' it less matches the classic liner
notes of that album - “part of a whole music that time is pressing
them to play” - and more the famous Talking Heads line - “say
something once, why say it again?” There's a gnomic precision to
it, where it's both expressionist scream and set of perfectly
composed miniatures.
And just as Copland had provided a
little relief into the programme's first half they returned for a
Harry Parch piece which was quite folky in it's lyrical melodicism,
the quartet strumming rather than bowing their instruments.
TIM GILL: AVANT CELLO
Kings Place, London, Sat 6th
May
I thought to take in this after enjoying
Maya Beisor's set earlier in the Cello Unwrapped season,
and after hearing Tim Gill played with the London Sinfonietta. As
seen several times by my lucky self, including the time they played a Mica Levi piece. (We don't just
throw this show together, you know.)
But also... well, I just plain
like the cello. As Thomas Ades, one of the
featured composers, is quoted in the programme “the cello of all
instruments makes one dream of Elsewhere when one hears it. Perhaps
because the colours are so rich and wide-ranging.” Certainly I
wouldn't travel so far for Maracas Unwrapped.
Eclectic programmes such as this can
become something of a grab-bag. The organising principle seemed to be
to alternate the more melodic, post-Romantic works with more
cutting-edge contemporary pieces. Well, I may find myself thrown out
the Modernist club for this, but it was the post-Romantic which won
out for me. The contemporary (at least in style) topped and tailed
the evening, with works by Anton Webern and Harrison Birtwistle. The
Webern in particular I found to be indigestible, and silently yearned
for something less strident. (But then he was a disciple of
Schoenberg, the guru of atonality.)
Whereas I did take to Thomas Ades, who
really did make me dream of Elsewhere. Or Arvo Part's lyrical
'Fratres'. Or Olivier Messiaen's 'Louange
a l'eternite de Jesus', where the accompanying piano
strummed a few languid notes, a steady hand on the tiller, as the
cello bowed it's sinuous way. (It's a movement from his classic
'Quartet for the End of Time', which I saw nearly a decade ago.)
Jonathan Harvey's 'Ricercare
Una Melodia' played back recordings of Gill as he bowed.
But rather than loops turning into a rhythm track or the subtly
shifting fuzzy shapes of Minimalist multi-tracking, the piece was
composed of sharp acute lines. These reverberated around Gill,
forming a kind of prism of sound. As the piece went on the recordings
slowed to half speed, becoming more of a near-drone backing.
Anna Clyne's 'Paint Box'
used recordings of human voices and other sound sources in a tape
collage/ music concrete style. It was one of those evocative works
that sound intimate and numinous at the same time, like it's able to
bypass your conscious mind entirely. However, unless I was missing
something, Gill's contributions seemed minimal.
After saying I preferred the
post-Romantic a glorious exception, and the night's highlight, was
Iannis Xenakis' 'Kottos'. In a perfect combination
of form and content, it required (and got) both wild and virtuous
playing. I wondered if it had been written for a performing spider,
only to read in the programme Kottos was a Greek God with a hundred
arms. Sometimes it went so far into raw rhythm it could have been a
noise artist improvising.
Judging by the general audience
reaction, this stirred people the most and should really have been
the finale. The night wasn't as involving as Beisor's overall, but
had it's highlights.
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