Musique Concrète Soundtracks To Experimental Short Films

At UbuWeb you can find the audio of Musique Concrète Soundtracks To Experimental Short Films (1956-1978). This was a precursor to Creel Pone - a series of six unofficial CD-R compilations of the electronic and tape-music soundtracks to experimental animations and films, released by the New England Electric Music Company. Many or most had never appeared as isolated audio outside their filmic context. 

Some of these films have appeared earlier on this blog. A few more are added below. 

Tom Dissevelt – Glass (1959) directed by Bert Haanstra

Gershon Kingsley – Pixillation (1971) directed by Lillian Schwartz

Percy Grainger – Free Music (1970), director unknown

Pierre Boulez – Symphonie Mechanique (1955), directed by Jean Mitry

Joan La Barbara – Dance Frame (1978), directed by Doris Chase

Bernard Parmegiani – Jeux Des Anges (1964), directed by Walerian Borowczyk

Włodzimierz Kotoński – Dom (1958), directed by Walerian Borowczyk & Jan Lenica

Pierre Henry – Les Amours De La Pleuvre (1967), directed by Jean Painlevé & Geneviève Hamon

Włodzimierz Kotoński – Labyrinthe (1963), directed by directed by Jan Lenica

Bernard Parmegiani – Steinberg (1966), directed by directed by Kassovitz

Bernard Parmegiani – L'Arraignelephant (1967), directed by Piotr Kamler

Robert Cohen-Solal – Délicieuse Catastrophe (1970), directed by Piotr Kamler

Bernard Parmegiani – Le Pas (1975), directed by Piotr Kamler

Bernard Parmegiani – L'Écran Transparent (1973), directed by Bernard Parmegiani

Here's Andy Beta's write-up of some of the earlier volumes: 

An amazing collection of crucial and lost slivers of both celluloid and sound, from right along the rim of the memory hole.

Tom Dissevelt's soundtrack to "Glas" (dir. Henstra, 1959) is almost like an Henri Chopin poem, with weird squeals and reverberating breaths and crackling radio voices intoning with dreadful menace among the cycling noises. Turns out to be about glass-blowing, go figure.

Gershon Kingsley provides a percolating soundtrack to "Pixillation" (dir. Schwartz, 1971), which shouldn't be too much a surprise for those familiar with his duo work with Perrey on The In Sound from Way Out. Very reminiscent of a coherent Sun Ra moog fugue and the most funky and taciturn of the entire set by far. 

"Free Music" from 1970, has Percy Grainger taffy-pulling some gossamer sound waves that thicken in a brief two minutes. 

The biggest name of volume one is Pierre Boulez, contributing his one and only electronic music piece to "Symphonie Mechanique" (dir. Mitry, 1956). It is an incredibly violatile magnetic tape piece that shimmers at a frentic pace, as if Raymond Scott and Xenakis are brainstorming sound ideas at the same time. 

A highlight of the set, as is Joan LaBarbara's piece. Probably more renowned as a 20th Century contemporary vocalist, along the lineage of Cathy Berberian, here she provides the pouring water, alien-lipped trills, and revolving rhythmic flutters for "Dance Frame" (dir. Chase, 1978), and it is vertiginous and brain-vaporising in its overall effect. 

The second volume brings forth two pieces by director Valerian Borowczyk, one being an historical soundtrack by Bernard Parmegiani for "Jeux des Anges" (1964). Roaring blindly with electric intrusions, it reveals itself to be the sounds of trains passing, slowing into drones of electromagnetic fields and distorted piano (or are they organ?) keys, which merge and split apart. Voices gurgle in with a percussion sound not unlike dropped microphones at the track's end. Noisy, and a very primitive bit from one of the future masters. 

Polish composer Wlodzimierz Kotonski's piece for "Dom" (1957) is flittering bits of key strikes and metallophone clops, swirling about each other with birdcall electronics. Percussion and metal scratching seeds the middle section, as more tape sounds swoop down to feast. A mysterious, melancholic, oddly reveberating horn theme joins in on the boings and gurgles to end the piece. 

With Yo La Tengo re-scoring the nature films of Jean Painleve recently, it becomes all the more crucial to hear Pierre Henry's original slithering and carbonated contribution to "Les Amours de la Pleuvre" (1964), which makes up half of Volume Three. Matching the onscreen movements of the octopus, Henry wags disturbing tentacles around the loud French narration, dropping in cavernous water drops between all the wiggling sounds, and making it all feel as clausterphobic as if you were yourself in its clutches underwater. 

Another Kotonski soundtrack, for "Labyrinthe" (dir. Lenica, 1962), ends the series. Pianos, black boughs, and looming maze walls are all set to vibrate in the shadows, along with some chilling laughter and odd chatters. The wind breathes ominously, and one cannot help but to put this in the changer next Halloween. While overall sound quality is hissy due to generational dubbing, the scope of these three volumes is of crucial historical value. If only these films could be so readily retrieved for each listen. 

PIOTR KAMLER, L'Araignéléphant / The spiderelephant / Slonoiga (1968)

  

"One of the Polish greats, Kamler made most of his classic animations in France, where he forged working relationships with musique concrete composers like Luc Ferrari,  Francois Bayle, and Bernard Parmegiani. The latter soundtracks “The spiderelephant” (1968) with wondrous avant-whimsy.  The film itself takes us into a glowing otherworld inhabited by the eight-legged pachyderm of the title.  Don’t worry about the narration in French, just relax into this exquisitely rendered tone-and-texture poem of crinkly iridescent lines and mottled patches of pink, violet, and grey. Every shot is like a Rothko if his career had been diverted into children’s storybook illustration. 

"If you enjoy “The spiderelephant”, try out Kamler’s similar  “La planète verte” – or the quite  different atmosphere / look of “Delicious Catastrophe.” Between 1977 and 1982, Kamler devoted five years of his life to creating a  full-length animated science fiction movie called Chronopolis – then, possibly completely shagged out, he returned to Poland and switched artistic lanes to  sculpture." 

- SR

"Kamler began studying as an artist in his native Poland in the 1950s – an era that saw an extraordinary flowering of creativity in the realm of experimental animation in Eastern Europe – but soon relocated to Paris. There he became involved with the Service de la Recherche at ORTF, France’s national agency for radio and television at the time. Among the entities working within the Service de la Recherche was the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), which remains legendary within the history of avant-garde music as an epicenter for composers, musicians, and technicians experimenting with electronic composition, musique concrète, and other forms of acoustical research. Among those working under the umbrella of GRM were such luminaries as Luc Ferrari, Iannis Xenakis, Beatriz Ferreyra, Bernard Parmegiani, Ivo Malec, and François Bayle, all of whom would collaborate with Kamler to provide soundtracks for his films.

"Kamler’s early films are predominantly abstract, emphasizing color, shape, and motion to create a counterpoint between image and sound. He moved increasingly, however, towards representational imagery, favoring surreal, haunting figures and fantastic environments whose symbolic suggestiveness and existential starkness are highly reminiscent of the work of other Polish animators like Walerian Borowczyk, Jan Lenica, Daniel Szczechura, Stefan Schabenbeck, and others. Using a wide range of techniques – from ink to pinscreen to rotoscoping to clay – Kamler created numerous short films from 1959-75, before devoting himself for the second half of the 1970s to the painstaking creation of his magnum opus, the feature-length CHRONOPOLIS, a dizzyingly inventive sci-fi allegory concerning the nature of time." -  Anthology Film Archives 

                                               

"Piotr Kamler’s SF film Chronopolis (1982) is a hypnotic exercise in sinister science whose imagery is lifted from an archaic stone vault. Against an unsettling patina of musique concrète composed by Luc Ferrari, we are plunged into a far future existence where immortal beings ensconced in a celestial city perform apathetic conjurations of matter. An external force, explorers climbing the pillars (?) that hold up the city, presage a deliverance from the languor that afflicts all.

"... In Chronopolis the hieratic denizens perform science as a ritual to hold off inexistence. The science itself appears primal, a knowledge forever know, but abstracted as mesmeric movement...

"The city, formed as if from astronomical telescopes and astrolabes, takes on the appearance of an ancient mausoleum wall, the figures chiseled yet animate, accessible though a causeways of gates. Kamler deliberately evokes the feel of Egyptian hieroglyphics without direct references. Or the pressing of a Phoenician seal into wet clay. The effect is timeless. The city has always been. The incantations that fill the sacred space continue. The musique concrète, the manipulation of found sounds, further enhances its timeless qualities.

"Like an animate Remedios Varo painting, this is an immersive experience with only fragments of plot."

- Joachim Boaz, SF Film Ruminations