SoundTracks 4 - a night of live music and images

SoundTracks 4 - a night of live music and images

The New Zealand Film Archive continues its annual live music and film series with SoundTracks 4 - Friday 29 August and Saturday 30 August, 8pm at Shed 11, Wellington.

SoundTracks features experimental musicians accompanying films from the archive’s collection. Last year’s event drew 500 people to Shed 11, and in response the Film Archive has this year expanded the event to cover two nights.

On Friday 29 August, electronic artist Rosy Parlane, guitarist Greg Malcolm, rock musician Rebekah Coogan and electro-acoustic composer Lissa Meridan (aka Fierce Angel) with Rowan Prior (NZSO) each perform 15-20 minute sets.

On Saturday 30 August percussion group Rotaction present a 45 minute show featuring their self devised instruments. They will be working in conjuction with VJ and artist Eugene Hanson. Also being presented on this night is Fetus Reproductions, an installation devised from the music and images of 1980’s electronic group Fetus Productions.

The SoundTracks series draws on the collections of the Film Archive in consultation with depositors. With the immenent opening of it’s mediaplex and cinema in 2004, curator Mark Williams says the SoundTracks series is a marvellous indication of many exciting film programmes to come.

Admission for both nights is by koha. For more information about SoundTracks 4 contact Mark Williams, New Zealand Film Archive, ph 384 7647, e-mail mark@nzfa.org.nz.

SoundTracks 4 - music and moving images Friday 29 August Saturday 30 August 8pm, Shed 11. ADMISSION: KOHA www.filmarchive.org.nz SoundTracks Performers

Electronic artist Rosy Parlane has recorded and released several CDs as a soloist and in collaboration with several stars of the European experimental scene. In 1997 Parlane’s improvising rock group Thela toured the United States with Sonic Youth. Rosy has recently returned from several years based in Europe and will be working with footage of the Antarctic shot by amateur film maker GT Perano.

Greg Malcolm has recorded three solo records that range in style from cabaret, surf and klezmer to sublime acoustic fingerpicked guitar. He enjoyed a brief spell of national notoriety in 1998 over his song ‘The Ballad of Peter Plumley-Walker’ which concerned the death of a Christchurch cricket umpire during a bondage session. For Soundtracks he will be working with two films from pioneer film maker Ted Coubray featuring the aftermath of the Napier Hastings earthquake in 1931, and a Coubray invention, the ‘Balance Speedweigh’ machine.

Rebekah Coogan’s rock group Cortina plays what she describes as “80's inspired space metal”. Drawing on Cortina’s trademark mix of humour and politics, Rebekah has taken multiple images of women and scenic New Zealand to create a piece concerned with women, the gaze and kiwiana.

Lissa Meridan (aka Fierce Angel) is an electro-acoustic composer who has performed multi-media collaborations for video, dance, installation and interactive performance. For SoundTracks, Lissa and NZSO cellist Rowan Prior will accompany four early French films from the collection of Alan Roberts. Roberts deposited many films with the archive during the 1980’s, many now acknowledged as rare treasures of early European cinema.

Rotaction are a sound-art group that perform on a remarkable collection of instruments made from a mixture of musical resources and hardware; galvanised rubbish cans suspended on piano wire, sticks, nails and self-devised drums and percussion. Their show is intensely physical and promises to be one of the highlights of SoundTracks. On Saturday Rotaction will be performing a special 45 minute show to a collection of industrial films shot by Canterbury film maker Roy A. Evans in the early 1960s. The films will be re-mixed’ live by video artist Eugene Hansen.

Operating as an audio-visual company from 1980-1989, Fetus Productions were part of a small global 'industrial' culture network, which included Throbbing Gristle in Britain, and Survival Research Laboratories on the West Coast of America. They released seven albums, designed clothing, wrote manifestos, made films, and challenged the parameters of music and art, blending pop, industrial and philosophical methodologies. Their work attacked advertising's promulgation of perfect images and perfect bodies using images of medical misadventure and mutation. The Fetus Reproductions installation is a 25 minute environment that reconfigures some of their previous work using DVD and digital technology. It plays before Rotaction on Saturday.

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