Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: film

  • music unfolds in the Funkhaus, live and barely planned

    Today we will be making a new song, the first towards Cathoel & the New Government’s eventual second album. First album prompted 50s jazz impresario Bob ‘King’ Crawford to say, “In my opinion you will be one of the greatest artists this country has produced.”

    He was talking about Australia but I have gathered fellow travellers from New York, Czech Republic, and Berlin. There’s eight of us today and only two have ever met. This is the persistent idea of ‘the new government’ – it is elastic and can consist of anybody who wishes to step up and take care of something they feel moved by. Something musical, something ecological; something furred or feathered, something human. It’s how plenty of people live in the world already. We’ll be recording in the famous Berlin Funkhaus and hope to produce a tiny doco about our day’s work, which will be improvised from scratch around a vocal line of mine. The lyrics were written on a drum kit in an Airbnb apartment in Spain:

    you came a-courting me
    in your skirt
    and no shirt
    and no shoes

    and I swallowed down all that you taught me
    in my bed
    in your arms
    in my youth

    Imagine a bunch of people with jazz sensibilities set out to make an electronica dance track, but using all real instruments and playing the whole melee live, not looped or sampled. Imagine it might build into the kind of trance intensity that explodes. This is my plan, insofar as you can call it a plan. I have only met one of these musicians before now, when he walked into a Berlin bar three years ago carrying a beautiful upright bass and proceeded to set up an irresistible stomp. I’m recruiting interested musicians online through musos’ groups. Song has no title as yet but we will see what evolves.

  • the great beauty

    If there is a chance you can get to see the Italian film before it closes The Great Beauty: do. It is just full and wonderful. Luscious but with not a drop running over, rich with sentiment free from sentimentalism. We sat so spellbound by the slow credits when the lights rose we were alone in the cinema. All the way home we were talking about it, but silently, pointing things out to each other to see. Under the moon we talked about it, mostly in gestures and unfinished language: the part with the flamingoes! the nun climbing the stone steps on her knees! the strippers in the window, the tourist who dies and the women singing on the antique balcony! It’s about a writer, who is old now and has only ever written one book. By the end of the film he knows what he will write next. He’s standing on a cliff top, indescribably except by film. If you love music, or dancing, or writing, or Rome, or the fact that human civilization has existed for a time on this planet: go see the film. I found it superbole.