Circle of Light (1972) - Anthony Roland / Pamela Bone / Delia Derbyshire +Elsa Stansfield.

 Would dearly like to see the whole of this film

Now did not know this Arena docu-drama existed - they do a good job telling Delia Derbyshire’s story in an elliptical and oneiric way that suits the  music and the crazily mixed-up era she passed through. But I can imagine that if you didn't know anything about her story, you might struggle. 

The cult of Delia is a remarkable phenomenon

 

The posthumous acclamation is extraordinary: a play, several docs, a major component of Cosey Fanni Tutti’s book Re-Sisters, a biography in the works, tribute records, an entire Wiki devoted to her every last bleep. "Pot Au Feu" sampled by Danny Brown. Etc etc

There are aspects of her biography and personality that made her irresistible material for cult figuration, where composers like Pauline Oliveros or Ann Southam or Beatriz Ferreyra or Else Pade simply don't.There's the Dr. Who theme and its national and generational impact. The brushes with famous rock stars. The eccentricities (snuff!). And then the disappearance into remote obscurity.  She was beginning to be a cult figure in her Sixties prime, notable enough to be a thinly disguised character in a novel. But then that was cut short and a decades of wilderness years ensued. 

A good proportion of the work is genius. But there is a sense that of its potential being constrained  and curtailed.  Who knows what  she might have done in different circumstances (not held back by the founding conception of the Radiophonic Workshop as ancillary and subservient - its output intended to be nothing more than audio components of other people's productions). What might have happened if she had gone on longer? "Longer" in both senses: longer in terms of her creative life, and longer in terms of expanding her canvas, doing works of scale. Her finest work consists of miniatures, anywhere from 23 seconds to 3 minutes. The exception that proves the rule here is Inventions for Radio. 

That sense of “what might have been” adds to an aura of tragic romance, whereas if she had found some cosy berth of institutional tenure and carried on making works at regular intervals … who knows? It is very similar to the romance of figures like Syd Barrett or Nick Drake or Alexander Spence… which wouldn’t exist if their grown-stout presence had been regular sightings on the Jools Holland show and a series of compact discs had chuntered out through the ‘90s and 2000s (cf Van Morrison, John Martyn et al)

The curtailment comes not just from institutional strictures but from her personal struggles - reverse adrenalin, composer's block, which started during the latter days of her time at the Workshop, and then the alcoholism and the retreat from the trendy, happening world of London.

Yet in a way, those very constraints at the BBC seemed to have given her focus and impetus. 

Perhaps she would have flourished with complete freedom and endless support from a backer, but who knows? 

The Circle of Light soundtrack doesn't really stand up on its own without the images - Anthony Roland’s film based on the photography of Pamela Bone. 

Whereas the best of the miniatures that she made at the Workshop are marvels that outlasted their original function and context, even though that originating purpose was their sole reason for being. 

Perhaps it's another case of "restriction is the mother of invention".

Jud Yalkut - Kusama's Self-Obliteration (1967)

 

Carroll Ballard - Crystalization (1974)

 

Warren Burt - Movement Is Its Own Language (1997)

 

A video and music synthesis piece made with borrowed video synthesis equipment (Fairlight CVI and EMS Spectre) and my sound synthesizers at home.  It was used as an interlude in a larger political performance piece "Diversity."  The abstract slowly moving graphics and microtonal electronic soundtrack establish the idea of the title - movement, above and beyond any comments our language might attach to it, has its own mode of expression and its own expressive values.  The final graphics are the product of one successful interactive improvisation with the electronic music and video equipment.

Cracks (1975?)

 

Featuring the voiceover of Dorothy Moskowitz of United States of America fame. 

Interview with Moskowitz at at Bob Fischer's The Haunted Generation: 

Then, by the mid-1970s, she was working as a voiceover artist on Sesame Street, providing half-sung narration for a jazz-fuelled piece of animation that has since become the subject of much online consternation. ‘Cracks’ tells the story of a young girl who sees the fissures in her bedroom wall transformed into a menagerie of animals. Aired fleetingly between 1975 and 1980, it was then banished – for reasons unknown – to a dusty archive, existing only in the realms of fuzzy childhood memory. To seasoned US hauntologists, it has taken on mythical status.

“There’s a lot of action on the internet about it,” says Dorothy. “When I tried to do the research, I found the woodwind player, the great Mel Martin, had passed away. The producer and probable script-writer Peter Scott was long gone too, and his family didn’t know anything about it. The only person left who might know something was Andy Narell, the steel drum player. But talk of hauntology… when we were recording it, a curious apparition appeared in the studio. A wraith of a young woman floated in, wearing shroud-like threads. Her name sounded invented, something like ‘Ether’ or ‘Skyward’, and she said [floaty, ethereal voice] ‘We’ll be finishing the animation soooooon’. A real white witch of a voice!

“I never heard anything more about it until decades later. Never saw it on TV. I was very surprised to learn it had creeped out so many youngsters, and that no one was able to find any record of it for so many years. In 2019 I started getting inquiries about it, and that led to a podcast and some media attention. I wasn’t previously aware that I was the focus of such nostalgia. Maybe I’m the Grandma Moses of hauntology!”

Moskowitz has a new record out with a cat who goes as Retep Folo, full story in the Fischer interview

Expanded Cinema: a tribute to Gene Youngblood's book - presented by LIGHTSTRUCK

 

Gene Youngblood Tapes on YouTube

RIP David Lynch

 

"Six Men Getting Sick" was Lynch's first exploration into film, made during his second year of study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in Philadelphia. Lynch describes it as "Fifty-seven seconds of growth and fire, and three seconds of vomit."1 The transition into film came from a desire to make his paintings move. "I was painting very dark paintings. And I saw some little part of this figure moving, and I heard a wind. And I really wanted these things to move and have a sound with them. And so I started making an animated film as a moving painting. And that was it. I wasn't in the film business."2 "I always sort of wanted to do films. Not so much a movie-movie as a film-painting. I wanted the mood of the painting to be expanded through film, sort of a moving painting. It was really the mood I was after. I wanted a sound with it that would be so strange, so beautiful, like if the Mona Lisa opened her mouth and turned, and there would be a wind, and then she'd turn back and smile. It would be strange."

"Six Men Getting Sick" was the result of Lynch's desire to create a moving film. It featured a animated film of several heads and arms which slowly grew stomachs and caught fire. The film ended with the transformed images vomiting. The film was shot frame by frame with a secondhand 16mm wind-up camera. Lynch built a special rig on top of the projector to allow the film to run in a continuous loop. The film was projected on a sculpture screen created by Lynch and Jack Fisk. It consisted of three plaster casts of Lynch in various poses and another face painted on. The sound was a tape of a siren played continuously.

The entire project cost $200 to do, a lot to Lynch at the time. It was shown at a Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts exhibition in 1966. Ten minutes out of ever hour the lights would be turned off so the film could be seen. The sculpture/film won a shared first place in the second annual Dr. William S. Biddle Cadwalader Memorial Prize. One of the judges on the competition panel was H. Barton Wasserman, who would finance Lynch's next project which became "The Alphabet."

- Lynchnet

Surrealist Cinema BBC Arena 1987 presented by David Lynch