'THE BRIDGE': ON HOW THE NORDIC GOT ITS NOIR AND ON TERRORISM AS PERFORMANCE

“Everything goes back to the beginning."

- From Hollow Talk by Choir of the Young Believers (plus the theme tune to 'The Bridge')

Into the Dark Place

Nordic Noir, it seems, has now become an international marketing term. Perhaps strange when you consider it never seems to have been intended as any kind of export. Which kind of raises the question, what is it and how did it become so popular abroad? Okay, that's two questions. So we may as well add a third – how does the most recent entry, the second series of 'The Bridge' contribute?

The aficionado may want to know we're drawing from a narrow sample pool here, specifically the original 2009 film of 'Girl With The Dragon Tattoo', the Swedish TV series 'Wallander' starring Krister Henriksson (2005/13) and the Danish series 'The Killing' (2007/12). (Yes, this ignores a whole lot of stuff, including source novels and two whole other versions of 'Wallander'. Absent for the following respective reasons - I haven't read them and I don't like them so much. We don't just throw this show together, you know.)

In a brief comment the 2011 American remake of 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo', I commented on Nordic Noir “reflecting the current crisis of social democracy in the Scandinavian countries.” Which in hindsight would seem a better description of capital-P political drama 'Borgen' (Denmark, 2010/13), and its more roundly positive view of social democracy's survival prospects. It's essentially about social democracy facing fresh challenges on a weekly basis, nested inside a meta-story of it rebranding itself with the growth of the New Democratic Party. It's not a story with a happy ending, in fact it is very keen to present politics as something without an ending, something perpetual. But its outlook is broadly positive. Which rather conflicts with something else I said - “a flower not wilted but poisoned at the roots.” Its this second phrase which now feels much closer to Nordic Noir.

If all the above examples are crime stories, Nordic Noir is less concerned with murder than with forensics. (It can have quite a love/hate relationship with action scenes, not knowing whether to dramatise or underplay them.) The singular title to 'The Killing', that's important. A single event, a murder or a disappearance, comes to act as a loose thread. Tug at it long enough and the whole cloak comes to be unravelled. Even when not based in novels, Nordic Noir tends to use novel-length plot lines, slowly uncovering a truth from beneath decades of suppression. (The exception being the standalone 'Wallander' stories, but then I've always seen that as something of a weakness of theirs.)

'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo', for example, focuses on the wealthy Venger family dynasty. Ostensibly benevolent and patriarchal, a pillar of the community, they are slowly stripped back, revealing a trailing tangle of crimes including collaboration with the Nazi occupiers. (As potent a subject in Scandinavia as in France.) And with them is stripped the whole social model Scandinavia was supposed to uphold.

Hence Nordic Noir's patented setting in the 'dark place'. The cellar or the woods, the hidden place, the edge. Trailers for that most recent series of 'The Bridge' involved Swedish detective Saga indomitably shining her torch into the latest of those dark places (above).

Yet the social democratic model is given another face in Nordic Noir. The 'troubled' detective has of course become a genre trope, as seen in McNulty from 'The Wire' or, moving on to CIA operatives, Carrie from 'Homeland'. McNulty states openly at one point that its what makes him good for his job that makes him bad for everything else. Yet the detective is held to be obsessively dedicated, trampling over social niceties and shouting at adversity in the pursuit of his case.

When you look at Lisbeth Salander (from 'Girl With the Dragon Tattoo', below), Sarah Lund (from 'The Killing', below) or Kurt Wallander (from... oh, you guessed, below) a more appropriate word might be 'autistic'. Salander is a gifted outsider, a tight-lipped emo. Lund and Wallander are less dynamic challengers to the status quo than crumpled figures. Defeated by life, crime-solving is the one area where they can have control. Unable to cope with the world at large, they focus on a microcosm of it - like a kind of art therapy.

That two of these three figures should be women is sometimes held as a form of feminism, a further example of Scandinavia being 'advanced'. I think it's something else entirely. Society associates women with nurturing, empathic roles – care work, customer services and so on. The concept of an autistic outsider woman vies with these conceptions. But it's also noteworthy how institutions, particularly public institutions try to feminise their image to portray the right note of approachability. Think of the way the BBC has decided it's nickname is “Auntie”, despite the fact no-one else calls it that without being told to. (Its generally referred to by staff by it's original Orwellian name, Big Brother.) By giving the cop, the person society has assigned to uphold common decency, a female face, Nordic Noir plays up to this. But it then distorts that sympathetic female face into something far less recognisable.

And if they export well? By design or (more likely) accident, all of this does in some way play up to popular stereotypes about well-meaning but melancholic Scandinavians. (Such as the popular supposition that Sweden has an unusually high suicide rate.) They commonly use the bleached look common to modern dramas – silver-grey skies, muted blues and greens. (Prompting Sam Wollaston to ask in the Guardian, “are there really no primary colours?”) Us foreign viewers can innocently fancy that Scandinavia actually looks that way.

In fact it's the two popular perceptions of Scandinavia handily rolled into one. They live in some liberal utopia of tolerance, overly generous welfare and designer furniture. But of course it's a sham, they're all secret drinkers and depressives. Our prejudices were correct, we knew it all along! While of course we can simultaneously be responsive to the plot lines. Even if these dramas have been incubated in Scandinavia, the two-headed monster of neo-liberalism and narrow nationalist xenophobia haunts our lives too. We can imagine we're watching somewhere strange and remote to us, even as we're able to relate to everything. It's like the way the best angsty, alienated music is made by youths. The rest of us can relate to those feelings, but youths are likely to be carrying them at their strongest.

Crime As Creative Art

'The Bridge' had its first series broadcast in Scandinavia in 2011, making it something of a late entry in the Nordic Noir stakes - after the phrase had passed into common currency. And so, perhaps deliberately, it chooses to vary from the formula - taking something of a chess move away from the others.

Though there's an autistic similarity of sorts to Salander or Lund, Saga is not cut from the same cloth. For one thing, with her patented Scandinavian blonde locks, sports car and leathers, you could make an action figure out of her relatively easily. (Though perhaps you could also have a Sarah Lund, with swappable jumpers.) Even Saga's name seems to border on a superhero codename. She's less dysfunctional than differently functional. In some ways she's more like the “high-functioning sociopath” of 'Sherlock', fused with the vulnerable Pinnochio innocence of Data in 'Star Trek Next Generation'.

And this is underlined by the premise. Both Lund and Salander have a male companion when they make their investigations. But the concept of 'The Bridge', heralded in the title, is the odd-couple relationship between Swedish Saga and Danish Martin. (It is almost hilarious the way a show with such an insular-sounding premise could find a foreign audience. The titles underline this by presenting the word “Bridge” in Swedish and Danish side-by-side. They're precisely one letter different.) While Saga is brilliant but cold and remote, Martin is instinctual, worldly while world-weary and something of a philanderer. Their mis-communications are quite often played for laughs. (Perhaps there's even some Spock and Kirk in those moments.)

However, the real difference is over the structure. There's the same general format, where a single incident snowballs into large-scale events. But the criminals are less hidden in institutions, their one discovered moment unravelling their deceit, than criminal masterminds outside the system. While Nordic Noir is not exactly scrupulous about credibility, 'The Bridge' dances furthest from believability, sometimes straying into 'Seven' territory. And these crimes have at least an ostensible political motivation. Chesterton's comment “the criminal is the creative artist, the detective only the critic” could have been coined for 'The Bridge'.

In the first series, the Truth Teller is committing an ostentatious series of crimes, all publicly announced, with the claim this is to draw attention to social problems. It's suggested he wins a fair degree of public sympathy, despite his murderous methods. It's like taking things on a step, where the failings of a nominal social democracy have become a given.

This is mirrored in the second series with an eco-terrorist cell. While the series pulls a switch half-way through, which both muddies the waters and makes matters more similar to the first , let's focus on the cell for reasons... well, of familiarity.

BBC4 have in recent years reserved the Saturday night timeslot for foreign dramas, something a bit arty and brainy while still a bracing thriller. Though both 'The Bridge' and French cop show 'Spiral' (above) have been shown in this slot, they are quite different beasts. If Nordic Noir works as an export through playing up to national stereotypes, it gains traction precisely by playing against them. It's set in Paris, yet in an entirely different city to the scenic tourist magnet, with its smart-waitered cafes serving lattes to the chic beneath the Eiffel Tower. Instead there's anonymous estates and il-equipped cop shops. While 'The Bridge' is sleek and stylish, 'Spiral' is gritty and fast-moving, often shot hand-held. Nobody, I am guessing, has bought a domestic furnishing after watching 'Spiral'.

Series four of 'Spiral',subtitled 'State of Terror', (2012) introduced new adversaries – an anarchist gang who had taken up terrorist tactics. And its these big differences between the two shows make the immense similarities between the terrorist gangs all the more striking.

Let's start by acknowledging the different shows do generate genuine differences. In 'The Bridge', the gang are so media-savvy you wonder if they have their own design consultant. They release choreographed and stylish videos, like a cross between the Residents and Bob Dylan's classic 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' video. Its terrorism as performance (below). While in 'Spiral' they're a gang of scruffy punks, led by someone looking remarkably like Dennis the Menace's Gallic cousin (below). As much as they communicate anything, they do it by spray-painting a wall.

Yet note that virtually Saga's first comment on the show was that cuts to library funding are “foolish”. Unblinded by sentiment, we're being tipped off, she sees through all that bogus economics. As with much Nordic Noir, the assumption is that she is reflecting the audience's liberal opinions. And her response to the eco-terrorist cell proceeds along similar lines. Partly her detective instincts are keen to assemble the puzzle. Partly her autism is relieved to be dealing with something explicable. But she also gloms on so quickly to their methods that she must be in some way sympathetic to them.

And in many ways the programme goes with her, simply taking for granted that not enough is being done about climate change and all the rest. Their slogan, “the world is bigger than us”, isn't really so far from my own Council's professed aim to be a “one planet city”. This isn't any-cause fervent fanaticism. Any frustration felt is quite genuine.

None of the cops in 'Spiral', characterised quite differently as day-jobbers, show any of the same implicit sympathies. And indeed, 'Spiral' is in general inferior to something like 'The Wire' in it's easy, one-dimensional portrayals of 'criminals'. But there's the same careful need to separate the 'good' protestors from the 'bad'. Here the gang uneasily share a squat with non-violent protestors, mostly concerned with providing the “sans papiers” with shelter. They are consequently torn between opposition to the gang, whose adventurism directly endangers them, and a reluctance to assist the police. And they distrust the cops not because they are the bad set against the good, or even because they are misguided, but because they know events have placed them on opposite sides. Their distrust is seen as understandable, even when the cops function as our main characters.

Yet, and this is perhaps the crucial thing, while they receive an implicit pat on the back for doing the right thing, it's taken for granted that their 'good' actions will accomplish nothing. Their reward for all this virtue is that its its own reward. In 'Spiral' they ceaselessly picket detention centres, but it's predetermined that after bashing their pots and pans they will go home and the centre will still be there. Similarly, 'The Bridge' ends up at a Climate Change conference, with an army of chanting protestors outside. But the story doesn't focus on them. They're just a crowd scene, a backdrop to set the real action against.

And yet there is little if any connection made between the ineffectualism of the 'good' protestors and the militancy of the 'bad'. And without this, what is left? What is it that makes the 'bad' bad? In both cases, the driving force is the guru-like leader, insisting this is the way it must be. (Needless to say, these anarchists have a leader and accept him as such.) The rest of the group then orient around this, as a bunch of henchmen and a waverer.

Now, this model may well match some political terrorist groups. In fact, I could name some right now with no effort. Yet what it really matches, note for note, is cults. Ultimately, they have more in common with Charlie Manson's Family than they do with, for example, the Weathermen. The leader's teachings must not be questioned. The actions he commands will do away with this sick old world, and take us somewhere better. Yet it is implicit that what his commands are really aimed at is the group themselves. The succession of ever-more-militant tasks serve to bond the group together. The members are on permanent trial, constantly asked to prove themselves again and then again.

Any expressions of doubt are not met with political arguments against reformism or references to the desperate nature of the situation, but simple accusations of disloyalty. Waverers are just being chicken. What the group is doing must be right, because that's what the group is doing. Anyway, its too late to get out now. And this model only matches actual political groups insofar as these might themselves overlap with cults. It's classic confirmation bias.

This is at its most explicit in 'The Bridge'. The group waverer is most hesitant over having a younger brother, who he is entirely responsible for. Needless to say these responsibilities mean nothing to the group, as they are something outside of it. And the younger brother is shown trying to fit in with his gang of peers, his greater efforts being met with greater derision. Of course the two plot-lines work in parallel.

The problem is not that either political gang is presented critically. I've seen enough of political groups in my time to have no rose-tinted views of them. They are often quite capable of becoming their own self-parody, of making stupid and self-marginalising decisions of their own accord. Nevertheless, there's a clear historical connection between increased repression, decreased effectiveness and increased militancy. The big era of leftist groups turning terrorist in the western world was the early Seventies – the Angry Brigade, the Red Army Faction, the Weather Underground and so on. And the people in those groups would have seen friends and comrades be beaten, imprisoned and in no small amount of cases killed. Of course, the evidence of hindsight is clear – their reaction was the wrong one, it only served to play further into the authorities' hands. But if it was a mistake, there was a context for the mistake. It wasn't a random outbreak of fanaticism.

The upshot is this - political protest is part of a flourishing democracy. It should be permitted, perhaps even to an extent encouraged. Tolerance makes us better people. Just as long as its implicitly understood by all involved that it will not and must not accomplish anything at all. To try and step outside of this is to place yourself inside an authoritarian and fanatical cult, which will never let you leave. We live in a town which has no other show.

And yet I like it. I'm glad its there. I lapped up both shows.

That may partly be down to sheer amusement value, like hearing Niall Ferguson on history or Michael Gove on anything at all. Though that alone would not deal with the way these stereotypes occur in otherwise 'quality' shows. There's something more important. I prefer it when political views with which I sympathise get portrayed, even in such an absurdly distorted way. There's a famous quote, though no-one seems to know whether it came from Gandhi or American unionist Nicholas Klein: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”

Its a problematic quote, especially with that word “win”. Quite often, “win” would seem to mean “get seriously hurt”. And of course even when there have been actual victories, “win” is still a way of capping the bottle. We're often told the Civil Rights movement “won”, even when it's two chief adherents (Martin Luther King and Malcolm X) were both killed mid-campaign and racism is rampant in modern America. The more radical wings are chopped from history, their demands forgotten. And the 'good' protestors of today are told that if they are not 'winning' like their forebears it must be because they're not good enough.

But focus instead on “laugh” and “fight”. Protestors can be denounced by politicians, caricatured in dramas, or scoffed at in sitcoms. But that's still a whole lot better than “ignore”.

I'm opposed to the mechanistic notion of how culture works, which sometimes tries to pass itself off as materialist. Culture is not rubber-stamped upon our thoughts by the cunning schemes of the ruling classes, nor is it imprinted by the material conditions of our existence. If, like me, you see history as the history of class struggle, then culture is one more arena where that struggle takes place. The floor of that arena is raked against us, but that's as true of any other arena.

Of course these shows are merely thinking up something juicily contemporary and enticingly risqué to spice themselves up. (“What if the villains were terrorists, but seemed to have some sort of point?”) But at some level, the existence of pro-immigrant protests in France or counter-summit mobilisations in Denmark have managed to intrude into the regular world of cultural production. “Ignore” failed. Now we're onto the next phase...

PostScript! Though the idea came separately, I could not deny I was influenced by this exceedingly good post Shabogan Graffiti wrote for Philip Sandifer's blog. They don't quite cover the same thing. While Shabogan Jack talks of the class base of villainy, one notable feature for both 'Spiral' and 'The Bridge'is that class is almost entirely absent - political activism is assumed to be innately voluntaristic. And hence of course, either cultish, hypocritical or both...

'THE WOLF OF WALL STREET'

Martin Scorsese's latest film, though based on the eponymous memoir of stock market fraudster Jordan Belfort, is not about the financial crisis. Belfort had been indicted a full decade before that. But it's like watching 'M*A*S*H' without thinking of the Vietnam war. We cannot help but see it through that prism.

As such, inevitably, many have tried to read a political commentary into it. Given Scorsese's history in gangster flicks, some have suggested we're being invited to compare Belfort and his huckster cohorts to those criminals of yore. Peter Bradshaw's Guardian review starts “imagine the honey-gravel of Ray Liotta's voice in 'Goodfellas' saying: ‘As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a stockbroker’.” The film is mostly played as a black comedy. Perhaps it could be seen as a modern version of Hogarth's 'Rake's Progress', a salutary tale of the road to ruin.

Yet others have seen in it a celebration of the Wall Street 'greed is good' ethos - a hagiography, a bigging up of those big characters, a revelling in excess. After all, the film is bookended by a corporate video for Belfort's company and one of his motivational sessions, as if the whole thing is one big PR statement. Producers Riza Aziz and Joey McFarlane were themselves former investment bankers. Who had to win a bidding war to get the rights to his memoirs. (While, needless to say, he has only repaid a fraction of the money he stole, when compelled by court orders.)

And it's a perfect fit, isn't it? One big business which trades in glamour and appearance sidling up to another. As if to complete the circle, Belfort himself has said he was 'inspired' by Gordon Gekko from the 1987 film 'Wall Street'. (Who of course coined that “greed is good” quote.) Seen that way the film indulges Belfort's claims for his company Stratton Oakmont - “this right here is the land of opportunity. This is America.”

Yet when asked these questions, Margot Robbie (who plays Naomi, the main female lead) replied:

“Gosh, I don't know. People keep asking that. I'm still obliged to think I hope they see a greedy lifestyle and in the end living in excess won't make you happy. But I don't think we made this movie to tell a moral story about what's right and wrong.”

And she's right. The point about the question is that it's the wrong one. It's like someone who only knows of religious art suddenly coming across a collection of porn prints, and trying to fit the new wine inside the old bottles. You can of course criticise the film for having no political agenda or moral standpoint. But there's no point in pretending it has one. Not even the wrong one.

Based on Belfort's memoir, it makes no pretence to objectivity. Almost the first shot is his sports car changing colour as he shifts the narrative. It's a distorting mirror. To be precise it's a convex one, exploding his salesman's grin over the screen. To quote Peter Bradshaw again: “his character gets to the end of this long movie having learned nothing, conceded nothing and even physically changed in no obvious way.”

And apart from him and his cohorts, who gets their face in edgeways? The schmucks they hoodwink go unseen, out of sight and mind, just the occasional duped voice over the phone. The FBI, while the antagonists, are essentially mirror images of the crooked traders. They're equally swaggering and macho, telling Belfort he's their “Greneda”. One side has their targets set in sales, the other in prosecutions – same deal.

The nearest to a moral voice is Belfort's first wife, Teresa, who innocently asks why he can't defraud rich investors who can stand to lose the money. And she's soon swapped for a trophy wife. (Robbie's Naomi, as mentioned earlier.) In fact it's hard to talk about the role of women in the film without sounding like some sort of tub thumper. It's like they took the most virulent feminist critique they could find and used it as a shooting script. It's like an MTV video with an R rating and a three hour duration.

Naomi must be the female character with the longest screen time, but she never builds into any kind of character. As with everything else, she's only seen through Belfort's eyes – a hot babe when she's giving sex, an uptight bitch when she's withholding it. She's not really any different from the general parade of strippers and hookers that line up through the film.

Needless to say, these are as much accoutrements as the sports cars and designer watches, flesh and blood versions of pointy signs which say 'RICH' and 'FLASH'. In a crass plot to smuggle out money, they absurdly tape cumbersome wads of notes all over a stripper. That image feels pretty much like a microcosm.

But there's more than that. Not only is there no disguising they're getting the girls purely through money, this is even flagged up. The cash (dubbed “fun coupons”) is as foregrounded as the girl flesh. The cash and the girl become equivalent, both seen as emblems of a winning personality. Notably, the desired location to screw a hooker is in the office. Very often at your work-desk, in front of your cheering co-workers. They're part of the same loop as closing the sale and hitting the targets, public demonstrations of virulence. Ultimately, sexual desire isn't really the thing. Even when they're interested in the girls, they're only really interested in themselves.

The film becomes a classic example of the sink hole of apoliticism. The genuine belief that you're not out to make any kind of political point, that's what makes its politics so virulent. There's no space for anything else here, beyond these get-rich scams, because what else is there? But that just raises the question – what kind of political point ends up being made? Despite all appearances, 'greed is good' doesn't really cover it.

Watching the film I was reminded of two quotes I'd read. Pete Townsend often commented all that interested most people about The Who was Keith Moon's antics. The band, the recording and the touring, just existed as a mechanism to keep him in crashable cars and tabloid headlines. And NME journalist Charles Shaar Murray once said that in the late eighties he went on a night out with city traders, and was amazed how their excess and debauchery dwarfed anything in the music world.

Now put those two things together...

Reviewing the Facebook-startup film 'The Social Network' (2010) I commented “this film’s tagline should really be 'dotcom startups are the new rock’n’roll.'” I was pleased with that at the time. As it turns out, I was wrong. Dotcom startups are like bluegrass or skiffle. They were just preparatory. Financial investments, they’re the real rock‘n’roll.

Notably, Scorsese has never made a rock biopic. (Perhaps just as well, most of them are terrible.) But he’s quite definitely a rock’n’ roll film-maker, in the way Altman is a jazz film-maker. Not just in the way music is so central to them. His films are kinetic, a seeming tautology transformed into a style. They leap and bound, rush from one grand set-piece to another. They act brash, they're big, broad statements. Even when you're not always sure what that statement is.

(I'm half-wondering if that's the reason why there's such an uncharacteristic shortage of rock music on the soundtrack here, because it would become a kind of double-booking. Mostly there's blues. Which works quite well. Despite the stereotypes many white folks like to stick on blues, it's not all etherial 'spiritual' stuff akin to gospel. There's a swagger to blues, which gets put to serious use here.)

Because, seriously, when was the last time rock star antics hit the headlines? And the very few that remain, can you see them mythologised by movies in the same way Jim Morrison or Sid Vicious were? People queuing round the block for 'Pete Docherty The Movie'? Rich lists have replaced chart placements in our mind maps of influence.

Of course, it may be I’m betraying my age with the rock stars comparison. Rock stars have not so much become a spent cultural currency as collapsed into that bigger, more insidious category of ‘celebrity’. (Take Ozzy. Who exactly could define what makes Ozzy famous nowadays?) And the film works as an exploded version of the ‘kiss and tell’ features celebrities are always selling to the tabloids. But either way, we're in the same sphere.

The film follows almost the same trajectory (you can’t really call it plot development) of a rock biopic, just updated and transferred. First the band get together, play some small gigs, start hitting the big time (defined as girls, drugs and money) ...then their camaraderie ruptures as everything crashes and burns. There's the same conflation of livelihood and lifestyle, as if what we have here is a lifestyle that pays. Hence the notion that drugs aren’t just a reward for hard work or something supplemental to what you do, but an essential component to it. It’s just that instead of taking acid in the desert and recording an album, you snort coke then seal a deal.

And just like rock biopics are interested in every aspect of a band's career apart from their actual music, so these sexy-new-world-of-business films shy away from the nitty-gritty of trading. As I said of 'Social Network', “the algorithm that underpins Facebook… can be paraded precisely because we don’t get it, it’s importance rising in proportion to its incomprehensibility.”

All of which is made explicit here. There's several scenes where Belfort starts to explain market workings to us, then cuts off as if able to see our uncomprehending faces. Don’t worry, folks out there, we know that stuff isn’t for you. More strippers soon, promise. In fact, things are even taken up a notch. We’re told definitively, and very near the start of the film, that no-one understands the markets. It’s like establishing a basic premise. You'd call it a game-rule, except it’s there to tell us this game has no rules.

Money used to be simple. You learnt the basic maths of it at school, and moved on. Now money has become a form of magic, like the shift in science from solid Newtonian particles to shifty quantum mechanics. Labour and materials don't make money any more, now money itself makes more money. Corporations can make it disappear from one jurisdiction and make it reappear in another. In fact, so magic has it become that even money-men don't understand money any more. They get where they are not by know-how but by strength of personality, by being able to ride it's chaos better than the rest of us. (Here the point of comparison would be Cronenberg's flawed-but-interesting'Cosmopolis', (2012) with it's portrayal of money as fascinating and inscrutable as religion, analysts studying currencies like ancient texts.)

And if this theory is correct, it could explain something which might otherwise seem beyond explanation. When Lord Jones complains of a culture of kicking "wealth creators", when Barclays CEO Bob Diamond insists the time of remorse for bankers should now be over (before most of us were even aware it had begun), when venture capitalist Tom Perkins compares criticism of the profligate rich to (yes really) Nazi persecution of the Jews, what is actually happening? Given that the world as we know it was almost brought to ruin by their reckless stupidity, given that the rest of us are now paying through the nose for mistakes not of our making…. seriously, what ‘kicking’ has there been?

As much as any criticism has occurred, it’s been kept out of mainstream political discourse. What may initially seem merely an absurd over-reaction, a crass case of chutzpah, is more accurately described as literally hysterical. We are only getting the reaction. What’s being criticised is the idea that finance capital can be criticised. It’s like Lord Jones and Tom Perkins have become the Royalty of the modern world. Even when they get it all wrong you’re not supposed to say so, in case that upsets the natural order.

Perhaps what this 'apolitical' film really does is explain this lack of ‘banker bashing’. Back when we had rock stars, what did we need them for? To quote the old Flux Of Pink Indians song, “vicarious living, ritual boredom”. Mostly, we use our cars to drive to work. The idea that someone else, in another reality, crashes his into a swimming pool – that titivates our lives of plodding mediocrity. But those same images give us a good reason to stay sitting in our crash-free cars. They live that way so we don't have to. They get the highs and lows so we can stay with the evens.

And just as rock stars are supposed to crash their cars, so must the stock of stockbrokers plummet. When Belfort's yacht gets scuppered, its neither moral lesson nor cheap figleaf. It’s as much a part of his role as when he was partying on its deck. The job of bankers and brokers is no longer to soberly invest our money, reassuringly dull-suited. Their job is now to drink, snort and screw it. They’re there so we can live our lives vicariously through them. Someone should make a movie about them.

Oh hang on, wait...

"I GOT A SONG TO SING": RIP PETE SEEGER

THE LENS OF LUCID FRENZY IS STILL STUCK ON SICILY...

…this time an excursion to Mount Etna. Full Flickr set here.

HAAS: 'IN VAIN'/ MIRA CALIX: 'QUEEN OF TORCHES' (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

HAAS: 'IN VAIN'

Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank Centre, London, Fri 6th Dec

Performed by the London Sinfonietta

Though a mere seventy minutes long, this work by contemporary composer Georg Friedrich Haas carries such a dramatic and tonal range that it's hard to frame, let alone analyse. No less a fellow than Simon Rattle, writing in the programme, asks not at all rhetorically “how to describe it?” In short, there's not much chance of comparing this one to Question Mark and the Mysterions. I am doubtless setting myself up to fail. But let's push on regardless...

Hass is often described as a Spectralist. Like all genres of music, people argue over what precisely it might mean. But a working definition for me would be blending the sonic adventurousness of Modernism with the emotional heft of Romanticism. Which seems pretty much win/win. Though this work apparently never succumbs to such a thing a conventional tuning, it at no point feels challenging or difficult, like being set a mental exercise. Many times it feels richly melodic. In the same programme Jo Kirkbride find it “grounded in a deeply Romantic tradition of swirling sentiments and long, languorous lines.”

It's chiefly famed for two things. First, written back in the millennium, it was a riposte to the election of far-right politician Jorg Haider in Haas' native Austria. (Which, alas, turned out to be a toehold for his fellows boots to return to Europe.) And, perhaps not unrelatedly, its known for the way sections are performed in total darkness. (Where the musicians must surely play by feel alone.)

Absolute music is the general term for music which is non-representational, the equivalent of abstract art. When such music comes appended with a political message, we might want to ask where it isn't just one big Rorschach blot? If we were told the message was that New England is lovely this time of year, that the rate of profit has a tendency to fall or that Everton have been playing rubbish all season – would our brains reorient and our ears just start to hear that?

Perhaps not, because despite knowing the anti-Haider stuff my ears still picked up quite a different sense from the piece. Rattle says “this piece is all about opposition of all types, about light and darkness.” Most obviously manifest in the literal light and darkness, of course. (One of Haas' other pieces is performed under constant darkness. Here the light is as much a symbol as its absence.) My simple ears may merely have been reductive but what I heard was an inherent dualism – the mournful, trailing fanfares of the brass against the low murmurations of the strings, made up not of individual notes but something closer to sound fields - something almost on the edge of hearing.

The structure of the piece also seemed to bear this out – which is actually a kind of anti-structure. Despite the great musical variety there's no division into movements, everything ultimately flows into something else. Rattle's take seems to be that it visits the primordial roots of music and climbs out again. Perhaps, but it worked best for me not pinned to any particular dualism (the seasons?, life and death?, creation and entropy?) but as more of a universal statement. It's black and white is like the shifting black-and-white of a yin/yang symbol.

Now Haas, present in the audience, rose to take applause at the end. And he seemed a most sensible chap. And I doubt he wants Haider and his noxious xenophobe cronies to be part of some endlessly recurring dynamic. He'd probably rather they were consigned to the dustbin of history, just like the rest of us do. The political statement, thereby, kind of went by the wayside for me.

But then, does that matter? Beethoven's third symphony was originally written about Napoleon, but we don't let that dominate our thinking when we listen to it now. Hass may simply be more absolute in his music than he knows. You're better off listening to it in the metaphoric dark, letting your senses pick up on what they will. Haider and his ilk will hopefully become a footnote of history, while people still listen to this work.

You can hear the whole thing on YouTube should you so wish. But let's link to a sampler for now...

MIRA CALIX: 'THE SUN IS THE QUEEN OF TORCHES'

Dome Studio Theatre, Tues 10th Dec

Part of Earsthetic

I first saw Mira Calix in this very venue several years ago, as part of the sadly-defunct Loop festival. Her unorthodox approach to electronics was almost indescribable and simply awesome. I later took in the 'Brainwaves' piece, inspired by her taking an MRI scan. Which was intriguing and highly inventive, but left me mildly agnostic.

In short, I've liked her less each time I've seen her.

This piece chiefly involved her creating sound through what was presumably a contact mike, either striking the floor or tearing at a black curtain behind her. A violinist and dancer were also involved.

I would concede I am not the most receptive person in the world when it comes to contemporary dance. But I couldn't help but feel the other two were there not to complement the performance but act as a kind of fallback – to fill things out if the electronics didn't strike up as well as intended.

Certainly the high points were where the electronics did strike up, layers of processed noise building into a kind of wall of sound - as if Calix was playing the very building. And the violinist worked best when complementing the elecroacoustics, and least when detracting from their purity with conventional notes and melodies as if he'd ambled in from some recital.

Dubbed a “sculptural art performance” it did contain a cool visual element. As Calix tore more into the backing sheet the stage lights correspondingly dimmed, and thicker and thicker shafts of light poured in from behind. Presumably this is where the title of the piece comes in. I was reminded of the shamanic ritual where paint is blown across a hand placed on a rock, then the hand taken away to reveal the handprint as a negative image – used as a symbolic gateway to the spirit world. And at it's best the performance did have something of a shamanic feel, using as tools the very basics of sound and sight but mixing them with modern technology. (There was also a theme about the new technology of photovoltaic cells... well, there usually is with this sort of thing, isn't there?)

But overall the highpoints were not frequent, and the piece felt overlong for it's contents. It was conceptual in the wrong sense, a vaguely interesting idea rattling around in the hope it might at some point land on something. In essence, it was differently successful.

No vidclips of the night (and I doubt they'd display the better elements of it anyway). So here's something more reminiscent of the first time I saw her, 'NuNu', based around the amplified sounds of insects and (IMHO) splendid stuff...

SIGUR ROS/THE WATERBOYS (MORE GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

SIGUR ROS

Brighton Centre, Wed 20th Nov

Though originally claiming to be singing in their own imaginary language, Sigur Ros later confessed they'd only ever meant that as a gag. In actuality they were simply scatting. Yet ideally, not only would they never have let on, they'd have convinced every country they visited that they were singing in a native language that wasn't theirs. That way, everyone can imagine you're singing something, which they can somehow intuit, without ever knowing for sure. After all, what is glossolalia but scatting given a religious context? Nonsense can be important stuff.

However, that alone would suggest their music is merely some kind of template, a big cavernous space onto which the listener can project whatever they want to imagine. Which admittedly would explain the keen-ness of marketing types to license their music for ads and soundtracks. (Requests which normally get turned down. Frontman Jonsi has spoken of his amusement at the resulting mini-industry in Sigur-Ros-alike compositions.)

That suggestion does perhaps have advantages over the other theory they get saddled with, that their soundscapes are a kind of sound painting of the landscapes of their native Iceland. And true enough, there's great footage out there of their touring their home island. Yet their music isn't cold and glacial, like Joy Division or Echo and the Bunnymen, it's richly melodic and quite often rhapsodic. The Bunnymen shot the cover art for their third album in Iceland. Whereas the projections which accompany this live show, while frequently of nature scenes, are rarely of anywhere particular. Many, in fact, veer towards the abstract. (A sense emphasised by the overlaying of the images on the band as they play.) Joy Division's sound, at least when it had been through Martin Hannett's production, was resolutely Modernist. Sigur Ros are more resonant of the previous Romantic era. It's the difference between Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff.

Ultimately, both theories are insufficient to the point of being diminishing. A more likely means to get somewhere would be to try and fit them together. They combine into a music reflecting both the enticing beauty and overwhelming scale of nature. Tracks show a vast dynamic range, rising to thumping crescendos utilising the full eleven-piece ensemble, then falling to the merest whisper from a single voice. It's nature to simultaneously find yourself and lose yourself in.

… which, and you may well be ahead of me here, makes it ideal music to see live. Not because of the stage show. (Impressive though that is, filling the eye without distracting from the music.) Not because they improvise or add elements or do crazy stage dancing, because they don't much. The truth is something much more simple. It's perfect music to experience collectively, in a big space full of people, forests of hands flying up as one. I normally steadfastly avoid the elephantine carbuncle that is the Brighton Centre. When a gig there can still feel involving, that's the sign of a band that's on to something.

It also felt right to see them on a dark Winter's evening. For the band look on the bright side in an almost literal sense. While stage shows by necessity involve lighting in some form, this seemed unusually based around the concept. Old-fashioned light bulbs (the ones that go off over people's heads in cartoons) sat on stands adorning the stage, emitting a warm orange glow, as if Edison had gone in for forestry.

Perhaps the actual moment of truth about all that 'sound-of-Iceland' schtick isn't what you see there but the proportion of time where you can't. For their homeland infamously falls into near-complete darkness in the depths of Winter. Perhaps the perfect night to see them would have been a couple of weeks later, on the Winter Solstice itself. Certainly it started to feel like a modernisation of some ancient ritual, nourishing the light in the dark like it's performing our magic which will see it grow again. (I was probably getting carried away by that point.) In choosing a name for his non-existent imaginary language, Jonsi hit upon Hopelandic. And indeed it all seems less the sound of mighty grinding glaciers than of flickering hope.

Despite the appeal of all that dynamic range, I think I took most to the more subdued and serene tone of the encore. It may have been that we needed to the bigger, more attention-grabbing stuff to pull us in, but once we were there the band had less need to address us and could simply speak.

From Brighton (unfortunately cutting off a bit abruptly)...

...and from Brixton, earlier in the year...

And, as if all that wasn't enough, check out the “evolving” video to the track 'Stomur' from the band's website, made from ever-changing footage supplied by fans – some live footage, some everyday diary stuff.

From Iceland to... Ireland. (We don't just throw this show together, you know.)

THE WATERBOYS

De Le Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, Sat 14th Dec

This tour was announced as a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Waterboys' most popular album, 'Fisherman's Blues.' But as Mike Scott (singer and sole constant in an ever-changing line-up) soon tells us it's actually the five-week anniversary of 'Fisherman's Box', a new collection of out-takes.

There is of course far too much of this sort of thing nowadays. Where every bump into the mike gets a retrospective release. Where editing down to get the good stuff has suddenly become a bad idea. Where our culture is so oriented around perpetual consumption we lap it all up regardless. Those CDs you buy because of all the extra material, even though you had the original LP, how often do you actually play those extra tracks? This box set, for example, runs across seven discs.

Well, most of the time that's true. But then Mike Scott's music with the Waterboys has never been constrained by such norms. He'd promised “we won't be playing the original Fisherman's Blues album in order or anything tame like that. That's not the Waterboys' style.” A full third of the set must have been taken up by these rediscovered songs. So rather than this being a retrospective affair, the night was instead filled with classic songs you'd simply never heard before. I came out feeling that 'Fisherman's Box' must be the most essential box set since 'The Can Tapes.'

Scott was always a prodigiously prolific songwriter who had the greatest difficulty in fitting his compositions into the then-constrains of two sides of vinyl. (See for example me raving about the awesomeness of 'Beverley Penn', effectively thrown away at the time.) But the trip to Ireland which launched the album seemed to spike his output still further. He'd originally intended to visit new band member Steve Wickham in Dublin for a week or two. As he later commented “100 songs and 2 years later" the album was ready for release. Apparently, he still had trouble editing things down to the seven CD limit!

While Steve (Wick) Wickham's fiddle playing had accompanied Scott on the recent 'Appointment With Mr Yeats' tour, about eighteen months ago, this gig reunites the dream team line-up by bringing in Anthony (Anto) Thistlethwaite on sax and mandolin. A Scotsman, an Englishman and an Irishman... it may sound like the start of a joke to some – but for me it was a very good reason to take the trek to Bexhill.

As the launched into their Patti Smith tribute 'A Girl Called Johnny', in the venue where last I saw Smith herself, it felt like a baton being passed. I'd written of that night “there’s nothing you could possibly compare Patti Smith gigs to except each other.” Yet, while there must be few music-makers in the world of Smith's calibre, Scott is surely one of them.

'Fisherman's Blues' is of course famous for marking the point where the band (to quote Smith) “plugged into traditional music.” And notably, earlier songs tended to go through a kind of 'Fisherman's Blues' filter, such as the stripped-down three-piece version of the once-epic 'Don't Bang the Drum.' As the place names above might suggest, this mostly meant Irish tradition. Yet Scott also spoke warmly of the band's then interest in Americana, even temporarily relocating to California to be produced by the larger-than-life Bob Johnston. (One full CD from the set is apparently dedicated to this period.) They even play a Ray Charles and a Hank Williams cover. I became quite excited by this discovery, before recalling the original album had a track asking 'Has Anyone Here Seen Hank?'

All of which said, I would have to say I find some guilty of printing the legend. For example David Simpson's Guardian piece makes it appear Scott had some sort of Damascene conversion. Personally, I consider their previous album, 'This is the Sea' to be their finest. But even those who disagree would be hard pressed to describe it as a standard Eighties rock album, sharing stadium space with Simple Minds.

Simpson focuses on the track 'Fisherman's Blues' as if it was Scott's version of 'Solsbury Hill', an abrupt and deliberate volte face in musical style, a bold statement of intent. But, especially in retrospect, you can see how much of an interchange there was. Wickham had already played on the track 'The Pan Within' and the very same month (March '85) they recorded their first cover of Van Morrison's 'Sweet Thing'. 'Billy Sparks', described by Scott as “a ragggle-taggle folk romp” dated from still further back, Nov '82. (Though admittedly it's not one of their best songs.)

The references in the track to being “loosened from the bonds that held me fast” may well be about slipping music biz expectations, for it's an otherwise uncommon image from Scott. But the line he cites as marking the decisive break is “far away from dry land and its bitter memories." When the previous album was called 'This is the Sea'?!? (And in fact 'Fisherman's Blues' is the most old-style track on its album.)

Yet if the shift from the 'big music' of London to the traditions of Ireland was organic rather than calculated, it was still a smart one. 'This is the Sea' was released in '85 and Fisherman's Blues' in '88. It was after punk's Year Zero rhetoric and post-punk's futurist experimentation, where every release came on like a Modernist manifesto. By that point music had changed direction and come to re-water it's own roots. 'Has Anybody Here Seen Hank?' had become a pertinent cry once more. (Dexy's Midnight Runners had already taken the same turn into Celtic folk, albeit more cartoonishly, in '82.)

Plus, the 'big music' sound of the band's earlier albums... it was great, but big music can only get so big before it becomes a Jenga tower. There's only so much up up there. A sideways step was what was required, and Ireland provided the place to step into.

More widely, by the late eighties Thatcherism was consolidating and counter-culture seemed on the wane. (Several commentators have connected Scott's departure to Ireland with his song 'Old England', a diatribe against the ravages of her ruinous policies.) Post-punk had been based around the utopian/dystopian dialectic of science fiction, but by '88 the future no longer seemed ours. A weird switch occurred, as if the monetarists were now the modernists and we'd become the conservatives, the custodians of some cherished tradition. As in the words of the 'Likely Lads' theme tune, the only thing we had to look forward to was the past. Certainly during that era I mentally divided music into stuff with a history, which came from some longstanding tradition, from the cappuccino-less froth that was flavour of the month.

Well, the past is a nice place to visit but you wouldn't want to live there. A Scotsman, an Englishman and and Irishman – that's not the same recipe as three Irishmen. Despite Simpson, Scott never “walked away from rock music”, but took what he wanted with him. It was the marriage of his tradition, of teenage playing in punk bands, with Irish tradition which produced the flock of beautiful children. The successor album, 'Room to Roam', where they did abandon rock music in imitation of Irish tradition, was notably less successful. What the band needed then was another sideways step... 'Fisherman's Blues' was a moment in a band's musical history, not a magic escape button.

But of course they didn't get trapped in the past forever. The band proved last year there's more life left in them, that when they raid their back catalogue it's for something extra, not a consolation prize for the lack of something new. Scott chose the name to suggest something ever-fluid, ever-changing. It looks like he's sticking to that.

The classic 'We Will Not Be Lovers.' I love the opening section with Scott, Anto and Wick grouped together...

...and the band and audience singing happy birthday to Scott, who turned fifty-five that very day. (My voice is in there somewhere. Thankfully inaudible.)

Recognise that backdrop? I didn't till the very end, when they reassembled themselves into the cover of 'Fisherman's Blues' (albeit with a couple of stand-ins). Which does serve to sum up the album quite well. The very fact they go to such effort emphasises what a classic it is. The only other cover I can remember having been reassembled in such a way is 'Sgt. Pepper'. But 'Pepper's cover is so composed, a statement that popular music had become something important. Whereas this is as casual as it is classic, a quick line-up of the musicians, as if done hastily between takes. And the fact that it is a line-up, in old-time black-and-white even, makes it feel traditional – as if from before the days cameras were quick enough to snapshot moments. As if they were itinerant players, showing up at the mansion house to play the wedding dance. And indeed, the album is all those things...

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE

For beginners only... One of these two men actually fought in the First World War. Can any boy or girl guess which?

“The conflict has, for many, been seen... as a misbegotten shambles – a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite. Even to this day there are leftwing academics all too happy to feed those myths."

“Politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder".

First quote: Michael Gove, Tory Secretary State of Education who was not born until 1967. He has now stuck his foot in his mouth so many times it must imagine it lives there.

Second quote: Harry Patch, last British survivor of that War

Slightly harder question – how much baseless jingoistic crap will we hear the Tories spew out over the 'Great' War in the next few months?

COLOUR OUT OF SPACE

Brighton (various venues), 8-10 November 2013

Yes, the welcome return of the International Experimental Sound Festival, now for the sixth time. I slackly made none of the week-long warm-up events, and missed some of the day-time stuff, but still by my reckoning saw some forty-four acts and one talk. Which is kind of hard to sum up, especially when it spans so vast a musical range. A problem I intend to solve by avoiding it. Here's just some random snapshots of stuff that went on, which doubtless misses out much that really should get mentioned...

Primate Arena, one of my personal highlights, were inexplicably thrown on first on the Friday night – before most punters had even arrived. Had they travelled from Tel Aviv just for this? They proved themselves well named, like they'd set themselves the constraining rule to work only with the rudiments of music. Impro music has a tendency to the full-on, to beset the listener with squally showers - which can have its place but sometimes seems to me a symptom of failure. Not sure what else to do, the players max up the volume and slam down the accelerator. The faster we travel the more likely we are to pass some sights. Whereas Primate Arena seemed to bode well for the festival ahead, by demonstrating just what subtlety can exist in this music.

The sax player blew gently, with just enough breath for sound to emit, not venturing so far as to play a single thing which might credibly be called a note. But perhaps they were most summed up by the singer, who sat less unmoving than comatose, barely parting her lips, seemingly too far away from the mike for any sound to transmit. The result was like a butterfly's wings causing some great chain reaction in your ears, like a few rough pencil marks which still serve to map out some vast edifice - even more gargantuan for just being hinted at.

Woven Skull, performing later in the evening with Core of the Coal Man, took a different tack to volume and tempo. They were perhaps just taking the old Jesus and Mary Chain trick, of turning Phil Spector's wall of sound into a wall of noise. But, unconstrained by song structures, they could push things so much further. Three drummers drumming, with screeching viola and guitar thrown on top, built in intensity until I feared both for their sanity and mine.

Perhaps they had pulled a reversed reversal. The first thing you notice with this music is the way rhythm and melody are summarily dispensed with. In such a context, to bring rhythm back in overwhelming force is like when a storm strikes in midsummer – nothing is nailed down in expectation of it.

Roman Nose found rhythm in more unexpected sources. It's a simple trick, loop the most unlikely sound source and you have a de facto rhythm. But they took it for all it was worth, throwing more and more elements in the sonic whirlpool, while throwing the strangest ethnic sounds on top like the folk music of the end of time.

There's a tendency, particularly within this scene, to go as far out on a limb as possible in terms of sound. Someone doesn't just want to be a circuit bender, but the bendiest of circuit benders. Which often ends up with you waving to them for a distance. The best stuff comes not from excess but from the unexpected juxtaposition.

Take for example the Y Band's use of vocals. Of course I get the reason why vocals so often tend to the scream, moan or guttural intonation – it's the stuff which can't be transcribed or otherwise reduced to language. But, somewhat marvellously, the Y-vocalist started off almost like a crooner singer. Perhaps the ghost of a crooner, cursed to haunt popular venues in perpetuity – but still a crooner. (Admittedly you don't have to come very close to conventional singing here to sound like conventional singing.) He even came on stage last, like Frank Sinatra after his band.

The juxtaposition with the strange, surreal music produced something almost Lynchian. There's the sense of being lulled into a dream and disturbed by a nightmare simultaneously. As so often they used a mixture of conventional instruments and impro devices, guitars accompanied by bicycle pumps. But the stranger sounds didn't come across as ostentatious or gimmicky, they just stirred themselves into the stew of strangeness. (Vidclip at end.)

The Y Band, I am not making this up, are some offshoot of the A Band. (Whether there's twenty-four other alphabetical splinters doing the rounds I couldn't tell you.) Yet the one time I saw the A Band I took against them, while the Y Band I'd put in the A list. It makes no sense. But then nothing does around here...

Disbelievers and nay-sayers tend to imagine us adherents to be gullible sorts, wanna-be hipsters praising with equal relish each display of the emperor's new clothes. In fact the Marmite reactions come like nowhere else. (With the sole exception of Rat Bastard, who seems to show up every year having not even changed his T-shirt. His 'confrontational' noise-guitar antics I have genuinely not heard described by anyone as anything better than tedious. Can't we just lie to him about the venue next time?)

In my case, there's whole genres, such as free jazz, which pass straight by me. And some might even have taken to the Gwilly Edmondez and THF Drenching's vocal malarkey, but I just used it as an opportunity to nip out for a Grubbs burger. After another act, which I'd much enjoyed, I came back into the bar to find a group of mates obliviously playing 'Operation'.

Meanwhile, a sizeable section of the crowd seemed to bail out early on for DDAA (Deficit Des Annees Anterieures or Defecit Of Previous Years – yep, they're French). True, they did sound like repetitive beats on Mogadon, served up by some old folks who had recently taken over the asylum. (Or however that saying goes.)

Yet that was precisely what was great about them! The beats slowed to the point where they may as well have been drones. While their vocals, at first mere intonations, slowly developed into fine and fluent harmonies. It was like centuries had been chopped out of music, and we had fast-forwarded from Gregorian chants straight into electronica. It was excruciating, true, but sublimely excruciating! I am not one to make grand national generalisations, but it did seem reminiscent of those scenes in Godard films that seem to go on beyond all point, and only then does the point start to emerge. It may have moved at the pace of continental drift, but if you stayed with it the effect became mesmerising.

I was, I'll confess, initially daunted to hear Makino Takashi's 'Space Noise' film was going to be over half an hour of purely abstract images and electronic noises. And certainly it took a while to get going. But the programme had told us “Takashi treats image and sound as elements of equal importance”, and as the film and his live electronic accompaniments went on they seemed to get deeper - as if what was on the screen wasn't changing so much as enriching. Soon the sounds and visuals mixed in some synaesthesic sense, until you were no longer taking them in on separate channels. Immersive is perhaps an over-used term, but it's the most appropriate one here. After thirty minutes, I was only sorry it was over.

The tape improvisations of Dinosaurs With Horns (aka Jospeh Hammer and Rick Potts) were given something approaching pride of place for so egalitarian an environment, headlining Saturday night then being interviewed the next morning.

Tape-looping may be at base no more than the truism that the more look look into something the more you see in it. Which might make it sound like sleight of hand, magic always relies on sleight of hand in some form. Being a fanciful type, I like to imagine there's something of Blake's “infinity in a grain of sand” about it all. Watching them perform, you cannot help be struck by how ably they can weave things. But at the same time, and perhaps more importantly, they give off the sense that everything has actually been this rich and strange all along - they were just the first to notice.

The interview was interesting despite their not being the most forthcoming of types, more keen to focus on the mechanics of manipulation than any bigger picture. They came across as stoner nerds, stirring strange improvised brews in their suburban basement as an alternative to leaving the house. They spoke of how their native Los Angeles was media-saturated even in their youth, with 24 hour TV while our lives were still marked by the closedown signal.

I came to think of them as the complementary opposite of Black Flag, operating from the same town at much the same time but taking things in opposite directions. It's the difference between the urge to destroy and to repurpose. The trashiness of mass culture drove Black Flag to iconoclastic fury, yet spurred DWH to find ways to use it creatively. (It clearly gave them great glee to explain that one of their videos was actually originally a demonstration of a Disney ride.) It's like both are Dada, but one is Heartfield and the other Schwitters.

They spoke of how the viewer always creates, a truism which immediately undermines the consumerist presumptions of mass culture. It's a peculiar distinction between the mind and the body. Feed the body on a trash diet and... well, I guess we all know 'Super Size Me'. But something in the human mind is able to take popular entertainers and production-line cartoons and turn them into tapestries. This sort of music is often taken to be marginal and inward-looking. Yet Dinosaurs With Horns are not challenging the way you hear weirdo impro music so much as changing the way you take in the mass media.

And if my powers of description have seemed inadequate so far, they fail completely from this point on. Take the low drones and rumbles of Fordell Research Unit. As the players sat calmly and almost motionless, like Max von Sydow playing chess with death, what emitted seemed less human construct than force of nature. If you could somehow hear a mountain range forming, it might sound something like them. Like a lot of these monumental soundscapes it was immensely powerful yet strangely reassuring.

Equally I couldn't explain why Dan Frohberg's ambient soundscapes sounded so utterly transporting, when so much of that music just seems New Age meanderings. Even his appearance, bearded hippy barefoot on the floor, seemed a positive sign – like he was Terry Riley's honorary Godson.

The period after Colour Out Of Space is a little like coming back home after a holiday. Where all the intensity and sense of innovation is suddenly over and the regular world reasserts itself on your jet-lagged self, and seems even more slow, dreary and orthodox than when you left it. On the other hand, you welcome the chance to catch up on your sleep.

Two clips, both courtesy of Dullbedsit Blogger. Firstly some “random bite-size chunks”. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth but no outfits are identified and I'm not sure it's music where a short segment really conveys anything. Still, it does demonstrate the variety of styles...

...and that promised Y Band vidclip...

SO LAST YEAR

New Year is of course a time to reflect and take stock. Which for me normally means totting up everything I've got behind on here. Frankly the picture is worse than ever, but I will try to catch up over the next couple of months. Mostly visual arts posts, which take the longest to write. But initially the catch-up over gigs will continue. (Which is the one thing I'm normally most on top of. That pesky fiftieth anniversary of 'Doctor Who'!) If, on that basis, you don't feel like checking back here for the next while, I don't suppose anybody would blame you.

If I don’t seem to have covered films much this year, that’s because I haven't seen them much either. This has been the official year of the missed film. Which is probably less to do with losing interest, and more to do with repeatedly coming home from work completely knackered.

Films I should doubtless have written something enthusiastic about include ‘The Spirit of 45’, ‘The Place Beyond the Pines’, ‘The World’s End’, ‘Prisoners’, ‘The Selfish Giant’ and ‘Gravity’. To my shame, I also failed to cover Cine-City’s welcome and fulsome Jan Svankmajer retrospective 'The Inner Life of Objects'. Alas, all I managed was some comments on 'Conspirators of Pleasure' over at 'I Munch Movies'. (Who generally did the thorough job I didn't.)

If pressed, I’d give a slightly softer thumbs-up to ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ and ‘The Wolverine’. (Though it galls me to type that bolt-on pronoun. When was he ever called that in the comics? And are ‘Casper the Friendly Ghost’ and ‘Muffin the Mule’ also now supposed to be the mature and sophisticated?)

‘Man of Steel’ and ‘The Desolation of Smaug’ seemed to belong together as (respectively) a re-imagining and an adaptation completely uninterested in their source material. So gaining any enjoyment from either became predicated on ignoring what was actually promised on the film poster. 'Man of Steel' in particular seemed keen to throw out anything but the most formal elements of Superman.

It seems a further step down. For the last few years you haven't been able to make a film that wasn't made already in some other form. Now it seems you also need to ignore what’s been made already, in case it’s not contemporary enough. It’s the inevitable result of any feedback loop – degeneration of sound into noise.