Norwegian musician Geir
Jenssen is no stranger to unusual venues, and it is
not the first time that he lends his music to support
moving images, most famously for the 1997 Erik Skjoldbjærg
film Insomnia and his vision of the soundtrack
for Man With A Movie Camera (Touch, 2001).
Yet, here the concept is actually quite different. For
five special dates in collaboration with Picturehouse
cinemas across the UK, Jenssen has teamed up with Cologne-based
award-winning video artist Egbert Mittelstädt for
an audio-visual treat.
Playing host to the first sale-out date of this UK
tour, the Gate Cinema in London’s Notting Hill
may not look much from the outside, but the beautiful
Edwardian setting of the auditorium is everything a
cinema should be: rich warm reds and golds on the ceiling,
wonderful soft lighting, nice comfy sits with plenty
leg room… Nothing short of a perfect venue for
this performance.
Opening for this first of two London gigs, the second,
concluding the tour, being at the Ritz in Brixton on
Saturday, was a fifteen minute performance of The
Joining Of Heaven And Earth, an sound and film
interpretation of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella,
burial place of Saint James, which once was through
to be the end of the Earth. Although the film has something
of an old amateur holiday movie, it also provided an
interesting counterpoint to the delicate soundwaves
After a short interval and a false start due to a defective
video cable, the Biosphere/Mittelstädt set got
on its way just after eight. Mostly based on Biosphere’s
recent Dropsonde, the soundtrack for the evening
provided a good opportunity to experience Geir Jenssen’s
highly textural soundscapes and lush jazz-tinted beats
in full surround sound. Yet, Mittelstädt’s
images of urban life, public transport, roads, bodies
or landscapes undoubtedly stole the show. The result
of sharp video editing and imaginative use of shapes,
his work is the kind of stuff dreams are made of. Or
chemically infused delusions for that matter.
Although none of the pieces were especially created
to support the music, or Jenssen’s compositions
created for the displays, there is a surprising synergy
between the work of both artists as they confront the
idea of still/motion in a variety of ways. Jenssen’s
work can appear monolithic and repetitive for the non-initiated,
but rapidly, layers appear that animate the musical
structure in totally unique ways. Equally, Mittelstädt’s
images often combine still elements within moving forms,
challenging the brain to cope in a rational way with
distorted reality. At one point for instance, shots
of cars driving up and down a busy street are suddenly
caught up on a still conveyor-belt-style frozen image
from one side of the screen to the other then become
animated again, at times vanishing into nothing and
reappearing at another point on the screen.
The human brain cannot cope well with so much conflicting
information and the work becomes totally hallucinogenic,
the music adding another layer of trance to the experience.
Lost, one is left with no choice but surrender to the
combined assault of visuals and sound for the entire
set. The only real concession to Biosphere’s natural
open-space settings came as he performed an extended
version of The Things I Tell You from Substrata,
accompanied by a film shot on a small speedboat. As
the camera continuously goes round, the moving image,
in the middle of the screen, freezes on each side and
just washes away. And this is very much the impression
left by the experience. A still life caught in motion
somewhere between reality and sur-reality, a mind-blowing
moment with no real references to normality…
For details on remaining dates, check out the Picturehouse
and Biosphere
websites. |
