MEMORA8ILIA

a filing cahinet for 8sided.blog

Youtube

I’m torn. YouTube is a repository of things otherwise impossible-to-find or out-of-print. It’s the only public place where you can hear Kraftwerk’s disowned early albums or watch Keith Levene abuse a Prophet-5 as PIL runs through “Careening.” These things are on YouTube because of fans and super-fans, noting a cultural absence and taking matters into their own hands. But no one’s getting paid, except for YouTube. And perhaps the uploader who unscrupulously turns on the monetization of an artwork that’s not theirs. That’s why I’m torn.

But discoveries like The Black Tower make YouTube seem all right. The enigmatically but actually named John Smith is a British avant-garde filmmaker whose work escaped me until I randomly peeped an exchange about The Black Tower on the Twitter machine. From what I’ve recently seen, Smith’s work is minimal but compelling, weaving stories and visual play from things noticed in his immediate surroundings. For instance, the 1975 short film Leading Light looks entirely shot in his bedroom. This article in Senses of Cinema digs further into Smith’s ‘familiar-but-unfamiliar’ approach.

The Black Tower is a 23-minute film released by Smith in 1987. The super-fan uploader didn’t monetize this, which is nice — The Black Tower is the sort of thing that should remain free of ads; otherwise, its spell is broken. “Architectural horror” is an intriguing phrase I saw to describe the film. For me, The Black Tower is like a campfire ghost story, except it’s told next to a darkened chip shop in a disused city alleyway instead of a campfire. 

The Black Tower mainly comprises of stationary shots of nothingness and near-nothingness, but this is gripping stuff. And inspiring, too — don’t let anyone tell you lack of budget or gear constrains triumphant acts of creativity. Just get that Black Tower out of your head.

https://memora8ilia.com/index.php/2022/07/25/im-torn-youtube-is-a-repository-of-things/

The Last Angel of History (Directed by John Akomfrah, 1996)

This short film starts by introducing a musical trio of cosmic influencers — George Clinton, Sun Ra, and Lee Perry — as an extension of Robert Johnson, who received the “black technology” of the blues in exchange for his soul. Or does this legend refer to a sort of visitation? We then move forward (or backward, as these interviews date from 1995) to techno and breakbeat jungle as recent applications of this technology. Science fiction is posited as an accurate reflection of the African diaspora, and we hear from the likes of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany. This all serves as an Afrofuturism manifesto, aided in tone by the enigmatic pronouncements of a “data thief” and director John Akomfrah’s mind-melting edits and shadowy stagings of the interview segments. A fascinating artifact with lingering contemporary significance.

❝ Last Angel is not only a film about science fiction but, partly influenced by Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée, it features a character called the “data thief” who travels back from the year 2195 to probe the failure of the Ghanaian revolution. If this all sounds hugely ambitious, Icarean even, that’s part of its appeal. It played a crucial role in popularising Afrofuturism – a term first coined by white theorist Mark Dery, and now used to describe countless exhibitions, film series and even films in which the term is used breezily, a floating signifier for something to do with technophilia, empowerment, a vague and breezy form of utopianism. “Because of the ways it uses the archive, its montage, its commentary – the film has become a codex of futurity,” says [“data thief” actor Edward] George. ❞ *

Edward George: ‘You can’t have Afrofuturism without some ambience of a fascist thinking creeping in’

https://memora8ilia.com/index.php/2022/07/22/edward-george-you-cant-have-afrofuturism/

A Guide to Chrome’s Dark, Dense Discography

I was pretty excited to see Chrome featured on Bandcamp Daily. I initially found Chrome in my mid-teens through the “New Age” video (probably seen via Night Flight). I was always on the hunt for weird shit™ to help me escape the confines of life in Central Louisiana, and “New Age” fit the bill. The song — and Chrome’s output at the time — was a remarkable portent. It signaled many things on the horizon, not just sonically but culturally as well. Check the cyberpunk current running through the “New Age” video, which also pays homage to A Clockwork Orange and THX 1138.

Around the same time that I discovered Chrome, I also encountered Cabaret Voltaire’s Red Mecca. That’s not too far off of a connection — Chrome were, in a way, the American Cabaret Voltaire when one looks at their respective experiments recorded in the late ‘70s and early ’80s. And as Red Mecca is accepted as the sound of a dark reflection on England’s Thatcher years, Chrome’s 1980 album Red Exposure (alphabetically aligned!) could be seen as a similar reaction to the national mood that brought the US into the Reagan era.

And just listen to Cabaret Voltaire’s “Landslide,” taken off Red Mecca. My favorite DJ in the world will be the one who mixes this with “New Age” in the middle of a packed-out ’80s night somewhere.

https://memora8ilia.com/index.php/2022/07/21/a-guide-to-chromes-dark-dense-discography/