The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => Arts & Entertainment => Topic started by: yu-huang on December 26, 2005, 09:31:05 pm
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Has any of you ever had this happening?
Like, I remember one time going to this place unassumingly named "Cinema Hole" to see some obscure alternative movies. Of course, all of them were extremely bad. Naive, pseudolyrical, with a bodacious disregard for coherence (or good lighting). I don’t know what I as doing there, there were drinks, and so on. But then, as I said, all of them lame, *except* for this one gem, this cheap-looking crime flick, with blaxploitation-like visuals, all set to some killer funk lines (accompanied to an eerie screeching trumpet). It was 20 minutes long, shot in grainy B&W, and the bit that sold it to me was that you could not make the dialogues out (“up”? I never know). The voices came out distorted, drenched in white noise, muffled. One could sort of follow emotional patterns in the characters voices, but it just wasn’t human. And I thought, “the dude made it worth”. To begin with, it was a very short film, because one just couldn’t stand much of that either, of course. And I was thinking, he made a mold, a frame that could dispense with plot. There were shoot-outs, hand fights in bars, car chases, make-out scenes, all gloriously chep-looking and in your face, but one couldn’t never tell how all that connected, and it never mattered, because it felt more like variations over a theme, or dream-like, with all those apparent non-sequiturs.
I thought it was genius to recognize that a 20-minute homemade brazilian blaxploitation movie wouldn’t exactly blow people’s minds. It ended up being almost Lynchian (when the movie ended no one was exactly certain it had ended, in a good way, i.e., people were willingly paying attention to what had been going on).
So there I went to congratulate the guy who had directed it. Of course, first thing I comment within hearing distance of his circle of friends is “Great idea distorting the dialogues, it was pretty cool”. Now that had been of course the result of a malfunctioning in a certain piece of machine during the projection. The movie wasn’t intended to sound like that, see? For some reason they just let it go and go. How was I supposed to know? Fuck them.
Or: Mogwai is releasing a new album anytime now, as some of you migh know. So a friend of mine downloaded some of the songs that had leaked, including one called “Friend of the Night”, which I thought to be the coolest thing I had listened to in a long while. It has this clipping effect going at odd intervals, putting the song in a mean free jazz freak out tempo while also rocking out, melting faces etc. I thought, “ok, dudes played a straight-sounding song and put it through some filter, it’s kind of cheating, but then fuck it, it sounds great”.
It’s a fuck*ng glitch. Checked on the Internet, the good version of “Friend of the Night” is the same lame Mogwai pap they’ve been putting out since Rock Action. Fuck you Mogwai, the best song in your album was just a Mcintosh fart.
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Or: Mogwai is releasing a new album anytime now, as some of you migh know. So a friend of mine downloaded some of the songs that had leaked, including one called “Friend of the Night”, which I thought to be the wildest sounding thing I had listend in a long while. It has this clipping effect going at odd intervals, putting the song in a mean free jazz freak out tempo while also rocking out, melting faces etc. I thought, “ok, dudes played a straight-sounding song and put it through some filter, it’s kind of cheating, but then fuck it, it sounds great”.
It’s a fuck*ng glitch. Checked on the Internet, the good version of “Friend of the Night” is the same lame Mogwai pap they’ve been putting out since Rock Action. Fuck you Mogwai, the best song in your album was just a Mcintosh fart.
Man, now I want to find a method to randomly frag copies of my MP3 collection. I'm sure 99% of the results would be totally unlistenable, or too corrupted to actually play, but if it yielded a few weird gems, it'd all be worthwhile.
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Well, you can check the song here: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=IQSZ4LYR (http://www.megaupload.com/?d=RNVESLOH). This version was edited by me. I cut the last two minutes of it because they suck.
You can compare with the official, "good" version at Mogwai's page at MySpace: http://myspace.com/therealmogwai (http://myspace.com/therealmogwai)
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There's a quote by Henry Parch, something like: "Mistakes open up the endless possibility for variation."
That blew my mind when I read it. I'll always be interested in recordings made with frazzled, half-hazzard equipment set-ups and a nice thick mental fog. The glitches and aleatoric noises are worth their little cults.
I can think of one example of an artified studio screw up. On the Flaming Lips' Clouds Taste Metallic, one of the guitars is played through a blown-out speaker. It switches between this and a proper speaker throughout, most noticeably on the first track. Maybe not genius, but it sounds cool.
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Flaming Lips... Maybe not genius, but it sounds cool.
Genius.
~Paul
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ideas you come up with by mistake are my favorite.
of course, I can't remember any of them now. I had these especially much when I was younger. I once, when very tired, came up with the idea to get electricity from the sun. It wasn't until I started trying to come up with a name for it that I realized that it's called "solar power". Damn.
But yes, I love those ideas.
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Most of Miles Davis was a mistake.