June 27, 2006
News | Concert: Boredoms at Intonation Festival, Chicago |
To my left a man held his hands in the air, tent revival-style, and shouted, "Thank you!" To my right, a man held his middle finger in the air and shouted "Fuck you!" Different nervous systems will react to the overwhelming intensity of the Boredoms in different ways.
The Boredoms don't play music, they play your head. Their tools are the technologies and conventions of popular music, used instead to perform brain surgery. They wield with precision the mundane array of three drum sets and a couple of keyboards to cut ecstatic waves in the air.
It's not chaos, not noise: It's all mastery and concentration. They'll work a high-speed interlocking tribal beat for 19.56 minutes, then stop on a dime and restart. Eye plays ascending swirls of augmented keyboard chords as if he's the horn section for some jazz band that's not there. After ten minutes, you start to hear the jazz band. That's not there. You start to hear a lot of things. That aren't there. Are they?
June 26, 2006
Robert Millis | Phi Ta Khon--Ghosts of Isan |Sublime Frequencies | Thailand
buy it
In Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan, Director Robert Millis takes us to the town of Dan Sai, home to the festival known as Phi Ta Khon, which at once ushers in the rainy season and pays tribute to the spirit world. The result is a florid and fascinating combination of phallic and demonic imagery. Men dress as women, ghosts and demons walk the street and people everywhere brandish wooden red-tipped penises, which they pump into the air. As in Carnival in Rio or New Orleans, there are floats, costumes, dancers, musicians and plenty of drinking. Perhaps most impressive visually are the beautiful painted masks.
The key sonic component is the funky regional music known as molam. It’s all over this video and getting to hear and see an electric pin (Thai lute) player shred on the back of a sound truck is pure magic. Paired with the masks and costumes, the music creates an experience unlike anything that’s ever come out of your TV. I couldn’t tear myself away.
Millis and his partner (the Sun City Girls’ Richard Bishop) keep themselves out of the action in this doc, instead preferring a “you-are-there” approach. Interestingly, they also choose not to interview any of the participants; in fact, there’s strangely little talking at all. This is reminiscent of an old-school ethnomusicological approach—in the early days of ethno fieldwork, the focus was mainly on documenting the music event itself. Today ethnomusicologists focus much more on what the participants have to say about a music event. I could see some criticizing this video for an “objectifying gaze,” arguing that the lack of participant perspective makes Phi Ta Khon like a nature video in which the natives are simply doing their thing unthinkingly.
However, this is a work of art. Personally, I think interviews would destroy the vibe Millis cultivates. Yet I would say that, paradoxically, there is a feeling of distance inherent to this you-are-there approach, as the voices of the participants (including Millis’ and Bishop’s) are absent. It might have been interesting had they added an alternate voiceover track to listen to in a subsequent viewing.
The bottom line is, if you’d like travel shows on PBS and cable a lot more if only the spunky hosts would shut the hell up, Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan is your kind of documentary. It provides the armchair version of stumbling into northern Thailand not knowing a lick of the local language, then finding yourself in the middle of ritual/festival you only vaguely understand. There’s a lot to be said for that experience. For those of you on a jones for your next travel fix, this DVD is a shot of electronic Methadone.
June 23, 2006
News | Beijing's disco crackdown sounds familiar |
Reuters reports that:
Beijing has banned disco and other dance music in private rooms of nightclubs and karaoke bars to curb the flood of illegal drugs into the capital's entertainment venues, Chinese newspapers reported Friday.
"Because many drug takers regularly dance and go crazy to upbeat 'disco' music in private rooms, police have specially requested karaoke machines not have this music," the Beijing Times newspaper said.
Club owners were now expected to delete disco and "other forms of vulgar entertainment" from karaoke machines in private rooms, the Beijing News said, as part of a "responsibility agreement" written up by police.
What kind of totalitarian state would do something as absurd as censoring dance music in order to curb drug use? Try the United States. In my hometown of New Orleans, the Drug Enforcement Agency held a rave promoter criminally liable simply for holding a rave in 2001. He faced up to 20 years in prison and $500,000 in fines. States like Illinois followed the federal lead, proposing anti-rave laws.
Of course, by the time the old folks were getting lathered about raves, the fad was on the wane in the US.
June 22, 2006
News | Asian Music in Chicago this Weekend |
There are a couple of great Asian music events coming up in Chicago:
Friday at noon Mia Park presents Silk Road Sounds. Mia, whose many activities include playing drums in various bands, hosting an indie music/puppet show on Chicago TV and writing the occasional review for this site, will bring Korean fan and drum music and Tibetan Buddhist chanting to Millennium Park.
There will be a Javanese puppet show at the Cultural Center on Sunday. For those of you who've never gotten to see wayang kulit (Indonesian Shadow puppets) and hear their gamelan musical accompaniment, this is a great opportunity.
See you this weekend!
June 16, 2006
A fine profile of Tan Dun appeared on National Public Radio this week. Particularly moving was his description of taking the "spiritual medicine" of Bach after suffering through the Cultural Revolution.
June 05, 2006
News | Film Review--Yang Ban Xi |
A common experience for tourists in China is sorting through the colorful and kitschy Maoist knickknacks sold to foreigners. In some ways, Yang Ban Xi is the filmic equivalent to that experience. Obviously aimed at foreign audiences, this documentary sets the Eight Model Works, the propagandistic musicals of the Cultural Revolution, in the context of today’s capitalist China. Director Yan-Ting Yuen serves us generous cuts of the surreally colorful and hysterically optimistic movie versions of the works, then leaps forward to digital video interviews with fans and performers. He also stages hip-hop and electronic reworkings of the musicals’ signature tunes.
In Yang Ban Xi, the digital present literally pales in comparison to the hyper-Technicolor past, suffusing the work with nostalgia that sometimes turns bittersweet. Its more poignant moments come from this interaction of past and present. It was jarring, for example to hear a Chinese artist who, like me, grew up in the 1970s, say that propaganda films such as The White Haired Girl and The Red Detachment of Women were the only popular culture he knew in his youth, as all other works were banned. (As he hit puberty, the latter film became fodder for his first sexual fantasies because the revolutionary outfits of the dancing Red Women showed a bit of leg.) In another scene, a director scolds the teenaged ballet dancers who are performing in a revival of The Red Detachment, who lack the fiery eyes of the original dancers. “Don’t look like it has nothing to do with you!” he shouts, but of course, it hasn’t. These lucky, young, bourgeois sons and daughters of the revolution know little of the madness and fervor of Mao’s decade. When Yuen’s young people dance to remixes of Model Works songs, the choreography is about the joy of movement and carries no other meaning at all.
While Yang Ban Xi does a good job of exploring the mixed meanings and feelings its subjects carry in relation to these Cultural Revolution spectacles, it doesn’t do as well at exploring the works themselves. Although the informed viewer will easily spot elements of Chinese opera and western ballet in the vintage footage, there is no explicit mention of this hybridization or how it came to be. The central role of Mao’s wife is made clear (in another of the documentary’s creative flourishes, the voice of dead Madam Mao caustically comments on scenes and interviewees) and key performers and a screenwriter are interviewed, but Yuen doesn’t look very deeply into the making of these films and attempts not at all to fit them into the cinematic and musical history of China. Instead, she presents the Eight Model Works like Mao wristwatches in a sidewalk display—colorful, gaudy, nostalgic and just possibly useful for telling us what time it is today.