music

Rabbit Trap (2025)

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“Listen,” speak-sings Daphne Davenport (Rosy McEwen) into her microphone over ambient nature sounds that she and her husband Darcy (Dev Patel) have been recording. “Noise … the oldest of gods. Before language, before flesh, before name, she was here.” It’s 1976, and the two of them have moved from London to the Welsh countryside with reel to reel recorders and state of the art microphones, which they traipse around the forest with, capturing the sounds of squelching marshes, nightbirds chirping as they move through the air in bloblike flocks, skittering feet of bugs across leaves, and the distant song of unseen fauna, or at least one hopes it’s something so natural. Later, the couple meets a mysterious androgynous child (actress Jade Croot, although The Child is only ever referred to as “he”), and when the boy asks if he can sing Daphne a lullaby that his mother used to sing him as a child, she records him as well. Listening back to it later, Darcy says it “sounds like a spell.” Rabbit Trap traffics in this idea, of sound as song, noise as god, voice as spellcraft, in a beautiful little folk horror from director Bryn Chainey, who has heretofore mostly worked in short film. 

There are points of comparison that it would be easy to go to when describing the film’s atmosphere. The sudden presence of a creepy child who brings with him portents of folkloric truth calls The Killing of a Sacred Deer to mind, and although this is set in Wales rather than on the Cornish coast, the atmosphere of isolation, hallucination, and lost time invokes Enys Men. There’s a sequence in which The Child leads Daphne to a series of tunnels and trenches that seem neither manmade nor natural and lures her through them by whistling a tune that she whistles back to him, and for a moment I felt I was watching Jessie Buckley harmonize with her own echo in Men. Despite these intentional homages or simple similarities, Rabbit Trap feels fresh despite being familiar. Even the way that this film goes to horror media’s most frequently visited well of late (grief and trauma are the real monsters) doesn’t feel like the cliché that it is. For one thing, the film never feels the need to dwell on what’s causing Darcy’s sleep paralysis. We see him experiencing strange dreams of the windows of the house being covered in goop and a spectral figure that may represent his father, with Daphne being quick to record his sleeptalking in the hopes that it might help him remember something when he wakes. Later, those dreams recur after he has broken a fairy circle, and in the end of the film, we find him standing in a beautiful vista recording his truth so that he can play it for Daphne later, since it’s too hard for him to say to her face. We can really only speculate what it is that’s caused Darcy to see himself as the source of an emotional “rot,” because it’s important only in its implications, not in its specifics. 

The plot kicks off when Darcy accidentally wanders into a ring of mushrooms, which folklore calls a “fairy ring,” and to break one invites the wrath of the Tylwyth Teg, fae from another world. Shortly thereafter, The Child appears outside of their cabin. Playing off Darcy’s concerns that he might be a burglar, he instead calls himself a hunter, taking Darcy to see the traps that he lays out for rabbits, taking special care to note that the bait has to be offered with honest and meaningful intention in order for the trap to work. The Child grows closer to both of them, taking an active interest in Daphne’s previous musical work (he asks if she’s famous, to which Darcy replies “You can’t really be famous with her kind of music. She’s more… influential”) and enjoying his and Darcy’s excursions into the marshes to record nature noise. As he becomes more and more of a surrogate child to the couple, his affection for Daphne grows to the point that he asks her to pretend to be his mother, as he claims his died long ago. Darcy, with his unspoken and only vaguely defined issues surrounding fatherhood, starts to get a little creeped out by this, and The Child’s behavior becomes more invasive and presumptuous. What little we do know about Darcy’s past is revealed to us not explicitly but in the way that he talks about sound—that god, that ghost, calling it a “Vibration of an event, an energy shadow, memory carved into the air, a scared lost creature desperate for somewhere to hide before it fades away. When you hear a sound,” he says, “you become its home, and your body is the house it haunts.” Darcy’s body is keeping an unknown score, and The Child has come to find a new family, one way or another. 

Much is left up to interpretation here. My personal reading is that the story The Child tells early in the story, about a baby brother that wandered into the Tylwyth Teg circle and disappeared, is actually about him, and that he grew up parentless in the fae realm, or that he was otherwise a kind of inverse changeling. Now that the ring has been disturbed again, he has the opportunity to go back out into our world and try to reestablish some kind of family, which would explain his quiet (and later loud) desperation on this front. This would also make his introduction of himself as a “hunter,” rather than the more accurate descriptor of “trapper,” a bit of foreshadowing despite the metaphorical, psychedelic rabbit trap that Daphne and Darcy must pass through at the end. Of course, this is a film that leaves a great deal up to your imagination, one that is more a visual and sonic experience than it is a narrative one. Its brisk runtime, coming in at under 90 minutes, means that this tone over text ethos never wears out its welcome. It’s unlikely that, at this late date, many people are still considering new entries onto their end of the year lists, and although this one was stellar, it’s one that will be waiting for you when you’re ready for it, but it’s an inexpensive rental if you’re still doing your 2025 end of the year cramming. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Colors Within (2025)

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The coming-of-age anime drama The Colors Within is about a teenager with extreme synesthesia who forms a synthpop band to express her unusual relationship with color through song. It’s a much gentler picture than that descriptor implies. Naoko Yamada’s color-pencil sketchbook vision is exceptionally quiet for a story about teenage rock ‘n rollers and exceptionally pale for an animated movie about the divine beauty of color. It celebrates the soft smears of color you see when you view the world without eyeglasses. It dwells in the dead air of band practice as the collective idea of a song is just starting to materialize, before it has any foundational structure to cling to. The three members of the band are each fragile recluses who spook easy, to the point where you’re skeptical that they’ll ever have the courage to perform for an audience. When all that restraint melts away during the climactic concert, however, the relief of its release feels good enough to make you cry.

Our protagonist is an adorable, shy teenager who can only relate to the people around her by reading the colors of their auras. Her sweetness and mental abstraction are a kind of social liability, so her only real friend at her Catholic boarding school is a well-meaning nun who encourages her to find “secular ways to honor God” outside the official curriculum. The opportunity to do so presents itself when an older, more rebellious classmate drops out to work at a local bookstore, and a panicked schoolgirl crush inspires her to demand they start a band together to keep in touch. A third lonely, shy musician who hangs around the bookstore brings the project together, but it’s a triumph that mostly manifests as long stretches of downtime between sparse songwriting sessions.

While our protagonist’s synesthesia is presented as a defining character trait, it really doesn’t affect her journey to self and communal discovery except in providing the language to express something she can’t otherwise vocalize. This is mostly a story about youthful, innocent yearning, both in romance and in art. Every member of the band has a secret, both in their unexpressed attraction to each other and in the ways their individual duties to education, work, and religion conflict with their art project. A lot of their yearning is just the desire to spend more time creating that art, finding it difficult to engineer opportunities to all meet in one place, working on one idea. I remember finding time to practice to be an eternal struggle back when I used to write songs for punk bands in high school & college, but I also remember the times when everything aligned just right for us to play songs together satisfying my soul like few other joys of my youth. It’s easy to be nostalgic while returning to that distinctly teenage headspace, so the story can feel like it’s set decades in the past despite all the smartphones and laptops.

The music our trio of sweethearts eventually plays together is catchy, soulful, and well worth the effort of waiting through the stunted progress of its writing. It’s also the music of dissociation, finding immense beauty, joy, and creative expression through the distinctly intangible sounds of synths, theremin, and guitar feedback. Synthpop is a perfect aesthetic choice for a character who sees the world through hazy, swirling aesthetics. It gives her a way to reinterpret her visions of color into the sounds of color, in the process expressing her love for her bandmates in a more direct way than she could previously express anything about anyone. None of the routine prayer nor rigid interpretation of God’s will at her Catholic boarding school ever approaches anything so purely divine. Thankfully, there was one cool nun around to help her see the positive value in those secular pleasures without feeling any unnecessary, residual shame for the indulgence. This is how I remember writing songs with my friends feeling at that age, but that is not at all how I remember my own Catholic schooling.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: The Music Lovers (1971)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1971’s The Music Lovers, is a biopic of 19th Century composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.  Most of my biographical knowledge of Tchaikovsky comes from this over-the-top distortion of his life, which mostly fixates on his volatile marriage to a fantasy-prone nymphomaniac.  A closeted homosexual, Tchaikovsky pursues a traditional marriage with the manic, insatiable woman to the detriment of his own sanity, inviting director Ken Russell’s usual erotic funhouse nightmares to spill onto the screen in spectacular ways that match the explosive piano jolts of Tchaikovsky’s music.  His violent compositions & barely closeted homosexuality land him firmly under the Misunderstood Mad Genius umbrella where Russell loved to play, meaning the film is so indulgent in its fantasy sequences and stylistic expressiveness that it’s foolish to form any concrete historical or political conclusions without further research.

Ken Russell was the master of turning real-life, historical artist’s lives into fodder for his own auteurist idiosyncrasies, from Lord Byron in Gothic to Franz Liszt in Lisztomania to Oscar Wilde in Salome’s Last Dance (which is what originally inspired me to track down The Music Lovers in a previous Movie of the Month cycle).  He did not own a total monopoly on the practice, though.  There are plenty of other directors who used loose-with-the-facts biopics of famous composers as inspiration for over-the-top, high-style pictures with little historical connection to those musicians’ lives.  To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to see more composer biopics gone wild.

Amadeus (1984)

Miloš Forman’s libertine biopic of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart doesn’t quite match the unhinged, sweaty mania of Ken Russell’s composer “biographies”, but it’s likely the closest you can get and still win a Best Picture Oscar.  Amadeus is wonderfully, extravagantly lewd, especially for a mainstream production. It characterizes the composer as a shrill, ridiculous fop whose fame at an early age stunted his emotional maturity — like so many fallen Disney Channel stars.  According to its stats on Mozart’s child-celebrity accomplishments, he had composed his first concerto by the age of 4, his first symphony by 7, and his first opera by 12.  It is not a birth-to-death biopic, though, so we do not see these adolescent accomplishments.  Instead, Forman delivers a character study of Mozart as a fully grown, immature lush whose undisputed musical genius does nothing to impede his love of sex, booze, and fart jokes.  He drinks himself into total delirium just like Tchaikovsky does in The Music Lovers, but for most of the picture he’s more of a hedonistic party boy than he is a self-hating sad sack.

While Amadeus indulges in the same “ecstatic truth” approach to historical storytelling as Ken Russell’s comparable biopics, it never totally detaches from reality in any decisive way.  Mozart’s bifurcated nature as a musical genius and a ludicrous fop is solidly grounded in a decades-long rivalry with his fellow composer Antonio Salieri, who cannot stand that his professional competition is a drunken jester whose music is “The Voice of God.”  That rivalry is fictional, but it’s not exactly a Ken Russell-style break from reality.  It does offer the film a bitter source of comedy, though, especially as Salieri’s frustration with Mozart’s ease in exquisite compositions starts to resemble Frank Grimes’s one-sided rivalry with the clueless Homer Simpson.  Forman has self-indulgent fun with Mozart’s life & music—historical truth be damned—which is the core tenant of all of Russell’s own biopics.  Lisztomania never had a chance at winning a Best Picture Oscar, so we might as well celebrate the closest the industry would ever get to that kind of anomaly.

Immortal Beloved (1994)

Candyman & Paperhouse director Bernard Rose attempted his own Ken Russell style biopic in Immortal Beloved, which portrays Ludwig van Beethoven as a temperamental rock star who took his anger over his own hearing loss out on the world at large.  Immortal Beloved delivers even less feverish Ken Russell theatrics than Amadeus, despite the surrealism of Rose’s iconic horror films.  It’s a little too restrained to match the fantastical heights of The Music Lovers or Amadeus, but it’s still a relatively fun, volatile period drama on its own terms.  That’s because it fully commits to the mystery genre structure that Amadeus only toys with as a convenient launching pad.  At the start of Amadeus, Salieri claims he murdered Mozart, but the 161min flashback that follows proves that confession to be figurative (and, again, fictional).  For his part, Bernard Rose fixates on a line in Beethoven’s actual last will & testament that refers to a mysterious “Immortal Beloved” that historians have never successfully identified.  Rose claims his own research and resulting Citizen Kane-inspired screenplay conclusively identified this Immortal Beloved that has been so elusive to Beethoven biographers for centuries. That claim, of course, is insane, but it’s the exact kind of unhinged energy directors need to bring to their projects if they plan to outshine Ken Russell in any way.

Unfortunately, Immortal Beloved also participates in the lowliest form of art: the Gary Oldman acting showcase.  Oldman plays Beethoven as a tortured creative genius and an excuse to don some dinner theatre old-age stage makeup.  Acting!  At least the movie’s adherence to Citizen Kane story structure allows for many points of view on Beethoven’s violent abuses.  Enough of his acquaintances report that the composer was “a terrible man” & “a scoundrel” that there’s nothing cool or romantic about watching him trash hotel rooms like a geriatric rockstar or cruelly insult the people who work to keep his life afloat.  Hanging out with a drinking, farting Mozart in Amadeus is a lot more fun, but there’s enough mysterious intrigue & proto-Sound of Metal dramatics in Rose’s take on Beethoven to make Immortal Beloved worth a look.  Besides, Rose’s conviction that he solved the case by processing it through mainstream screenwriting conventions is just objectively hilarious.

Paganini Horror (1989)

Both Amadeus & Immortal Beloved play around with the biographical details of their respective composers to up their own entertainment value, but neither can claim to go as off-script as the cheap-o Italo slasher Paganini Horror.  There were real-life rumors Antonio Salieri maintained a bitter rivalry with Mozart, even if those rumors have been proven false by historians.  Beethoven’s final will did refer to a mysterious “Immortal Beloved”, even if Rose’s claims to having uncovered that enigma’s identity are ludicrous.  Luigi “Star Crash” Cozzi’s Paganini Horror is working with even an even flimsier scrap of historical inspiration than either of those pictures, though.  Apparently, Niccolò Paganini was such a virtuoso violinist that it was rumored he sold his soul to Satan for the talent, earning him the nickname “The Devil’s Violinist”.  That’s all the real-world inspiration Cozzi needs to resurrect Paganini’s ghost on the set of a “Thriller” rip-off music video shoot, modernizing his musical devilry in the most direct, literal way possible.  Now, there’s a Ken Russell-style disregard for the respectability of real-world logic & historical fact.

Paganini Horror is basically off-brand metalsploitation, trading in the genre’s hair metal soundtrack for classical compositions and cornball 80s pop.  While filming a promotional “video clip” for their new single (a modernized recording of a lost, cursed, Paganini composition, of course), an all-girl rock band accidentally summons Paganini’s ghost, who hunts them one-by-one with a novelty violin knife.  They trade myths about Paganini’s signature on a literal contract with Satan, or how the musician used his wife’s intestines as strings, and you can still hear “the screams of his poor bride” today.  We don’t get to see much of that, though.  We get loopy music video clips & dream sequences where the devil’s violinist chases buxom new wavers around an abandoned castle.  Apparently, the production couldn’t land the full financing needed to stage all of the gore gags in the original script (co-written by Daria Nicolodi as a mockbuster version of a Klaus Kinski Paganini movie that never materialized), so they replaced the gnarlier details of those kills with more loopy dream sequences.  It’s a fun, detached-from-reality schlock novelty as a result, never quite reaching the euphoric highs of a Ken Russell art film but often reaching for the weirdest indulgences possible in a movie about a real-life historical figure, fictionalized beyond recognition.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #159 of The Swampflix Podcast: The Song Remains the Same (1976) & Concert Films

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Welcome to Episode #159 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of classic concert films, starting with Led Zeppelin’s stoner odyssey The Song Remains the Same (1976).

00:00 Welcome

03:23 The Northman (2022)
06:01 The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)
08:34 Con Air (1997)
12:37 Bullshit
13:54 Smooth Talk (1985)

18:53 The Song Remains the Same (1976)
34:49 Sign O The Times (1987)
47:25 Depeche Mode 101 (1989)
1:06:17 T.A.M.I. Show (1964)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew

Sound of Violence (2021)

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I never want to fault a movie for being too ambitious for its own good; I really do love an overreaching mess.  The low-budget sci-fi body horror Sound of Violence tests the limitations of that love, though.  Maybe it’s because the film doesn’t trust the audience to keep up with its plentiful, competing ideas – explaining its basic premise & the definition of “synesthesia” twice, once in opening voiceover narration and once in a classroom lecture.  Maybe it’s because some of those ideas are inherently more exciting than others (a killer drum machine vs. an unrequited romance between twentysomethings roommates).  Maybe it’s because its budget can’t always match its imagination.  Whatever the reason, Sound of Violence is overflowing with creativity & gusto that it can’t quite mold into something fully coherent or commendable.  You have to squint past its flaws to appreciate what it’s going for, but it’s mostly worth the effort.

An experimental musician (Jasmin Savoy Brown) seeks self-therapy for her hearing loss and childhood PTSD by creating rhythmic beats out of the recorded sounds of violence, quickly turning her into a serial killer.  That violence also triggers synesthesia, causing her to see cosmic swirls of CG colors.  And she’s in love with her oblivious roommate.  And the kills involve increasingly bizarre torture devices that double as musical instruments.  And we spend some time with the cops on her trail.  There’s a lot going on here once you get past the embarrassing cheese of the childhood prologue and opening narration.  The only problem is that the Color Out of Space-style synesthesia swirls and the musical torture devices that trigger them are 1000x more interesting than any of the other narrative quirks competing for attention.  When our trouble antihero is “composing” (i.e. rhythmically torturing victims to death in preposterous contraptions while effectively tripping balls) you feel as if you’d never seen anything like it before.  The budget, premise, and runtime can’t sustain constant hyperviolence, though, so it loses its way filling in the sequences around them with tons of plot & character detail that you have seen before—many, many times over—and the whole picture suffers in that contrast.

Its budget is an obvious, constant limitation throughout, but Sound of Violence has Big Ideas that often push its already heightened premise into full-on delirium.  It’s the kind of mixed bag that’s worth wincing through its momentary misfires, since the payoffs are so uniquely deranged.  At its best, it’s a pure sensory horror, combining intense sound editing and mad-scientist visuals to completely overwhelm your sense of basic reality.  At its worst, it feels like a pilot for a primetime CW soap about a hip, young serial killer’s unconventional way of processing #trauma (a hot topic on television these days).  It begins and ends with its weakest moments, but there’s tons of wild shit in-between that you won’t find anywhere else – from a dominatrix-spanking drumbeat to a tender performance of “Amazing Grace” on a theremin.  It’s glaringly imperfect, but it at least it’s playful & eager.  There are plenty of films that are technically better made but don’t take any risks half this interesting.

-Brandon Ledet

Humoresque (1946)

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All year, I’ve been working my way through my 4-disc DVD set of Joan Crawford classics, packaged for department store sale by TCM about a decade ago . . . It’s generally been a personal goal to clear my pile of unwatched physical media from my shelf during the pandemic, and with the more daunting sets like this (as opposed to standalone horror schlock with no air of sophistication or prestige) I genuinely have no idea how long I’ve allowed it to collect dust on its still in-tact shrink wrap.  Three movies into the Joan Crawford set, I thought I had a grasp on the types of movies TCM was attempting to highlight with the collection: stylish noirs with a touch of romantic melodrama.  Then, I got to the final film of the set, a full-on melodrama with no interest in crime genre tropes and barely any interest in Joan herself.  I think I have a much better understanding of the inanely titled TCM Greatest Classic Legends Film Collection DVD set now; it’s just four movies Warner Bros would license to TCM for cheap that happened to share one of the studio’s biggest stars.  Basically, it’s the Old Hollywood equivalent of those Drive-In Classic 50 Movie Pack DVDs you’ll find haunting the bottom of every Wal-Mart bargain bin in the country.  The fact that all four of the Joan Crawford discs were stacked on top of each other in a single slot in the case should have tipped me off that this wasn’t a lovingly curated set with a clear, explicit theme.

Maybe going into Humoresque with expectations of seeing another stellar Joan Crawford Noir killed any chance I had of enjoying it for what it is.  Humoresque is a sweeping melodrama about a virtuoso violinist whose promising career is derailed by his obsession with a wealthy drunk socialite played by Crawford (and by his own runaway hubris).  While all the other films included in the TCM set have been stylish noirs with Crawford at the center, the much less charismatic John Garfield is the star of this picture as the troubled, romantically obsessed violinist.  Crawford still plays a kind of sultry femme fatale, but she’s more of a supporting character than the center of attention.  It’s at least a half-hour before she even appears onscreen.  There are also no crime thriller tropes to speak of despite Crawford’s framing as the femme fatale.  The movie is intensely fixated on the world of chamber music both as an industry and as an artistry.  We follow the violinist through a prolonged rags-to-riches uphill battle where he defiantly proves himself as the greatest living artist in his field, locking the rest of the world away as he hones his craft to an unmatched extreme . . . until Crawford derails his attentions.  As a result, the musical performances often overpower the film’s function as an actors’ showcase, with great attention paid to making it look as if Garfield were actually playing the violin (with a technique similar to how Sesame Street makes it look as if Weimaraners were actually eating spaghetti off a twirled fork).  And because of the context I encountered the film within, I couldn’t help but spend those scenes asking “Where’s Joan?” instead of simply enjoying the show.

Of course, Crawford does make great use of the diminished screen time she’s allowed here.  Her role as an adulterous socialite who wears old-lady glasses and downs way too much top-shelf liquor is a fun turn for the powerhouse actress, even if it’s one she could play in her sleep.  Her alcoholism affords her some moments of violent, wildly passionate outbursts and her exorbitant wealth affords her opportunities to model gowns by Adrian – which look gorgeous on her, as always.  She gets to be the life of the party, holding court over her socialite minions who bray at ever tossed-off quip she amuses herself with, like when she calls the violinist “a rare animal, a New Yorker from New York.”  She’s also painfully aware of the fact that this is not her story, that she’s only lurking at the periphery.  In the emotional climax of the film, she shouts in her young lover’s face that she’s “tired of playing second fiddle” to his art, and I totally got it.  I was tired of watching it too.  It’s in those drunken outbursts where the movie finally comes alive for me, especially once she punctuates her wildly jealous complaints by smashing her cocktail glasses in a fit.  No one can hurl a drink at the wall in anger like our gal Joan, and here she earns bonus points by throwing a second one through a closed window.  None of the film’s orchestral spectacle could match the pure ferocity of that drunken anger, and the movie could’ve used a lot more of it, centering her as the protagonist.

The good news is that there is a movie in this same TCM set where Joan Crawford is unhealthily obsessed with an (amateur) musician, and the story centers her story instead of the over-confident beau’s: 1947’s Possessed.  At this point, it’s near impossible for me to watch any of these films without comparing it to the other inclusions in the DVD set.  That’s especially true of Humoresque because it is such an outlier, both for falling entirely outside the confines of noir and for not featuring Crawford as its lead.  In that spirit, here’s a picture of what the TCM Greatest Classic Legends Film Collection looks like and a best-to-worst ranking of how much I enjoyed each title.

1. Mildred Pierce (1945)
2. The Damned Don’t Cry (1950)
3. Possessed (1947)
4. Humoresque (1946)

Watch this one last, if you bother to watch it at all.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Home of the Brave (1986)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before and we discuss it afterwards. This month Brandon made Boomer, Britnee, and Hanna watch Home of the Brave (1986).

Brandon: One of the more frequently repeated clichés in the weeks following the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was “This is not who we are.” Political pundits & sentimental patriots were quick to distance their own guarded mental image of Who We Are As Americans from the racist, conspiracy-addled maniacs who attempted to thwart the democratic process that day. That’s easier said than done. America is a vast assortment of all kinds of disparate peoples & ideologies, and this recent election cycle has only highlighted what an alarming percentage of the U.S. citizenry are fascism-friendly white supremacists. A distorted, revisionist version of this country’s history and shared principles has been so rigorously hammered into our brains without reckoning with the uglier truths at its core that we genuinely have no idea Who We Are. Our national identity is mostly built on an often-repeated lie, so we have a lot of self-examination left to do if we can ever claim “This is not who we are” the next time far-Right extremists commit an act of domestic terror in an effort to disenfranchise Black voters.

This national self-examination does not have to be an entirely pessimistic or self-flagellating effort, though. One of the more glaring recent examples of popular art grappling with this topic was last year’s David Byrne concert film American Utopia, the kind of political self-reckoning you can dance to. In the film, Byrne’s parade of solo & Talking Heads hits are bookended by short lectures that examine the function & the soul of American culture from an abstracted outsider perspective – a kind of spiritual sequel to his small-town America portrait True Stories. American Utopia is an honest but optimistic temperature check of where America is today, both acknowledging the horrors of racially-motivated police brutality that have long been a stain on this country’s honor and pointing to our current moment of change as a possibly transformative turning point towards a better future. Meanwhile, everything onstage is rigidly uniformed & regimented like a dystopian sci-fi film, with the traditional rock performers’ instruments & colorful costuming stripped away to mimic the minimalism of modern performance art. It rightfully earned a lot of praise for its honest but hopeful examination of modern American culture, but it also reminded me a lot of another, older work that was very dear to me in high school: Laurie Anderson’s United States I-IV.

United States was a four-part, two-night concert series in the early 1980s that combined lectures, performance art, digital projections, and avant-garde new wave compositions in a way that innovated much of what Byrne has been praised for in his own concert films, American Utopia & Stop Making Sense. Unfortunately, that stage show was only officially documented in audio form (on the excellent four-hour concert album United States Live). The closest motion-picture document we have for the series is the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave, which Anderson directed herself. Home of the Brave is a streamlined, 90min distillation of United States I-IV that collects the more polished versions of the show’s compositions that appeared on Anderson’s first two studio albums, Big Science & Mister Heartbreak. In the film, Anderson also observes the soul & structure of America in a series of abstracted, outsider-POV lectures the way Byrne does in American Utopia, but those monologues are interwoven into her avant-garde new wave songs to the point where there’s no boundary between them. It’s an existential “Who are we?” national identity crisis for The Reagan Era, one that still rings true even if our populist politics have only gotten more rabid and our technology has upgraded from landlines to smartphones.

Laurie Anderson begins Home of the Brave with a stand-up routine about the 1’s & 0’s of computerized binary code, then immediately connects that line of thought to America’s national obsession with being #1. From there, she continues to abstract other basic modern concepts to the point where they feel foreign & uncanny: America’s national identity, the nature of rock music, the absurdism of gender performance & 80s workout routines, basic human interactions, technology, language, etc. Musical instruments don’t look or sound the way they’re supposed to, with violins transformed into synthesized samplers and rubber-necked guitars creating hideously distorted waves of noise. Anderson waltzes with William S. Burroughs, calls her keyboardist on the phone to chat mid-set, and at one point transforms her own body into a literal drum machine. It’s difficult to say with any clarity how these individual elements directly comment on the nature & soul of modern America, especially since the screen behind her often broadcasts phrases like “YOU CONNECT THE DOTS” in digital block text. Still, the overall effect of the work is an earnest prodding at what, exactly, we are as a modern society. Instead of declaring “This is not who we are” in the face of repugnant Reagan Era politics, Anderson instead asks “Who are we?”, which is a much more worthwhile spiritual & intellectual response to the hell of modern living.

I know all this abstract head-scratching about national identity and the eeriness of modern technology sounds a little hyperbolic for a concert film, but that’s exactly what Laurie Anderson’s art & music has always inspired in me. Hanna, do you think Home of the Brave has anything direct or meaningful to say about life in the modern Western world, or in America in particular? Or did you experience it merely as a kooky performance of esoteric new wave jams?

Hanna: Both! I think I would have to watch Home of the Brave at least three more times to absorb a thesis about modern intellectual and spiritual identity. However, one of the many threads of thought I really enjoyed was the obsession with categorization to cope with complexity, and how that categorization limits our understanding of our own experience and cannot possibly provide real comfort. In the short song “White Lily”, Anderson misremembers a scene in Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz where a man walks into a flower shop and asks the florist for a flower that expresses: “Days go by, and they just keep going by, endlessly pulling you into the future …” Apparently, it’s a white lily. I’ve always liked those moments where somebody asks for a simple representation or expression of something confusing/painful/complex and receives a representation that’s totally insufficient, like the scientists in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle who discover that the secret to life is “protein”. The fact that Anderson uses a white lily instead of the actual flower mentioned in Fassbinder’s film (a white carnation) is especially appropriate: first, because people are filled with little bits of information they’ve reconstructed to suit their needs and memories; second, because it might as well be either flower – both of them “mean” the same thing, which is nothing. We’re all just desperately trying to organize the world through our grossly inadequate schemas and forget that we’re big electric meat bags, pulled endlessly forward by impulses we can’t control (0 … 1 … 0 … 1 …). I don’t think this is a specifically American impulse, but I do think that American culture is especially repulsed by ambiguity—as referenced by Anderson in her opening monologue—and is especially prone to cutting the world up into jarring and unnatural pieces to avoid uncertainty.

Even without the intellectual and spiritual reflections on modern existence, Home of the Brave is a stone cold stunner in the arena of Kooky Jams. I was absolutely reminded of American Utopia and Stop Making Sense, especially because all three concerts host ensembles of incredibly talented people and funky performances abstracting the human condition. I think the biggest difference between Byrne’s films and Home of the Brave is that I could not take my eyes off of Laurie Anderson; she is, without a doubt, one of the most commanding performers I’ve ever seen. Her short spiky hair, wide eyes, and long white silk coat give the look of a mad music scientist; her voice slivers, swoops, shrieks, and howls in the span of a minute; and her performance varies incredibly in tone, both between and within songs. For example, “Difficult Listening Hour” opens with Anderson announcing the start of the aforementioned radio show (the spot on your dial for that relentless and impenetrable sound of Difficult Music!), a concept which I find endlessly amusing; the song takes a menacing turn when the speaker comes home to find a man sitting in their house, with “big white teeth / like luxury hotels on the Florida coastline”, and a mouth like “a big scar.” Yikes! Even the delivery of her prose is mesmerizing – she withholds her speech, slowly releasing phrases one after the other with total control in a way that’s utterly captivating (“and the flame would come dancing out of his mouth … and the woman liked this … very much.”) For the entirety of the show, I had the impression Anderson was interrogating me philosophically with a fun band and big shirts and satellites. Does that make sense? No! As I’m writing this, am I realizing that maybe I have a big crush on Laurie Anderson? Yes!

Boomer, what did you think of the tonal shifts in the songs and skits throughout Home of the Brave? Did Anderson fuse chaos into something meaningful, or was I just hypnotized by her snake monologue?

Boomer: One couldn’t blame you for being entranced by her poems or monologues. Poetry is a peculiar form of writing in that its beauty exists (and one could argue must exist) in two distinct realms, the physical and(/or) the abstract, in the performance or on the page. Even a novel or essay with the most melodic prose elicits something different than the poem, and some poems cannot exist on the page and must exist in the performance. There’s no way that this is a universal experience, but by the time I was seventeen, I thought that there was no better demonstration of fauxlosophical depth than being obsessed with Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and found the exultation of it within my peer group to be annoying, until an undergrad class years later in which a professor played a live audio reading of it, and it just clicked. There’s a division in poetry between what can exist and remain both alive and meaningful on the page (and each person’s mileage on which poets for whom that might be the case) and what demands a performance, requiring bombacity and the meaningful pauses Hanna mentioned.

It’s that same mesmerism of her activity that means that I can’t rightfully say whether or not something “meaningful” was created in this synthesis of images, ideas, and sounds. It may be partially due to the quality of the version I was able to track down, but there are large sections that are verbally focused and wordy (like the discussion of the one-zero dichotomy) and some that are less clear for a first time viewer like I was; I was a little lost during the phone call with the keyboardist and although I feel like I absorbed the essence of the skit, any meaning was outside of my grasp. There’s a certain rhythm to what Anderson’s doing that, stripped of all of the props and projections, there’s a kind of sermon happening before you. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, but I spent a lot of time in churches in my youth with a lot of “fellowship” that was indistinguishable from the instruction of the week before, and the week before that; as such, my mind often goes into a kind of self-defense mode, where I get absorbed in the melodicism of the language but the words themselves sort of float past me in the stream. Home of the Brave does something similar in parts, as it moves from music to spoken word to skit to music again and so on, all flowing into one another without discrete sections. This is an immersive experience, and a beautiful one, but until I read Brandon’s description of the film, I failed to CONNECT THE DOTS between a philosophical criticism of American opulence/consumption and the specifics of Anderson’s recitations (even though it’s right there in the title).

I do love Anderson’s ear for lyricism in her koans. I’m not familiar with any of the works referenced, but I do know her album Big Science; in particular, the track “From the Air” was in the digital library at KLSU when I was a DJ there, and it got heavy rotation during my three years as the morning drive DJ as both a phone-in request and just because I like it. I always loved the self-reflectiveness of the line “This is the time / And this is the record of the time.” It’s such a pure distillation of the artist’s experience: the semiotic thing that is being signified is the time, but the art which is the signifier is also the sign, and the record of the time, as it both creates and captures. Even though I didn’t digest Home of the Brave‘s intent as well as I might have, I knew what I was in for when I heard that we were watching a Laurie Anderson concert film. Britnee, is she an artist with whom you had prior familiarity? If not, what was your experience going into this “blind’? And if so, where does this work fit into your larger cognitive framework of her art?

Britnee: I wasn’t very familiar with Laurie Anderson prior to watching Home of the Brave. I knew of her, and I knew that she had a very unique music style. When I was younger, my aunt had a wicker basket filled with cassette tapes. I would love digging in it to find new musical discoveries, and I vividly remember picking out a copy of Laurie Anderson’s Strange Angels. The album was mesmerizing, with “Coolsville” being my favorite song from it. I didn’t know what any of the lyrics meant, but it made me happy. This is the same feeling I got from watching Home of the Brave. I didn’t pick up on the meaning behind all of it, but I enjoyed every minute.

Mainly, what I took away from Home of the Brave was admiration for Laurie Anderson as an artist. She’s the total package. Watching her move across the stage with her mad scientist business suit, doing all of her strange choreography, was a real treat.  I was way more focused on her than I was on what she was trying to say. One of my favorite stage props was the screen with all sorts of images and messages projected. “What does it all mean?” was a constant question in my mind while watching the wacky journal entries and animal drawings pop up on the screen. I still don’t really understand what it all means, but I found it to be exciting and thought provoking. This is definitely a film I would have to watch a few times to truly get its full effect, but I think that’s more of a personal problem and no fault of Anderson’s.

Lagniappe

Britnee: Anderson’s Nash the Slash style getup at the beginning was such an attention grabbing opener. The voice modulator she used to create this disturbing electronic male voice was both chilling and brilliant. That will forever be the first thing I think about when I think about Home of the Brave.

Boomer: There’s a moment in this film where Laurie Anderson is dancing in her silk suit with her back to the audience/camera and the spotlight on her is a yellow gel, and her body movements are very similar to those of Jim Carrey in The Mask, and she suddenly turns around with a very “large” expression on her face, for lack of a better term. As much as I can’t stand The Mask (I have a Pavlovian dislike of Carrey’s work as the result of having a peer with severe ADHD—before they learned to pacify kids in the classroom—who would endlessly repeat every Carrey film routine on a daily basis in class, with at least one outburst per hour from 1995 until 1999, and only then because Austin Powers started airing on TNT constantly so there was another reference point to beat to death and then some), I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the mannerisms of the character were inspired by elements of Anderson’s performance art.

Hanna: A short stream-of-consciousness from my notes while watching this film:

She pops up through the floor! Squeaky voice! “Bending” the guitar! It sounds terrible! Now he’s hitting it with a mallet! Everybody’s just jumping around! A big fish bowl porthole magnifying her face! Ballerina accordion player! Huge drumsticks! Hitting a ball with the guitar!

So, if that (in addition to abstract new wave) sounds at all appealing, I highly recommend Home of the Brave.

Brandon: I know that Stop Making Sense has been communally anointed as The Greatest Concert Film of All Time, but this movie certainly belongs in that conversation, if not only for highlighting how Anderson’s work pioneered a lot of the more Conceptual Art elements that bolster Byrne’s stage shows. At the very least, it’s outright unforgivable that it never made the format leap from VHS & Laserdisc to DVD or Blu-ray. I would love to see a cleaned-up version in a proper theatrical setting someday, but for now all we’ve got is dead formats & fuzzy YouTube uploads.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
April: Boomer presents London Road (2015)
May: Britnee presents Trouble in Mind (1985)
June: Hanna presents Chicken People (2016)

-The Swampflix Crew

Le Choc du Futur (2020)

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The French historical drama Le Choc du Futur (The Shock of the Future) is a shameless nostalgia piece. Almost 100% an exercise in aesthetic posturing, its entire thesis is that late-70s synth music sounds cool as fuck and women didn’t get enough credit for pioneering that sound. It’s not wrong; early analog synths and the women behind them are incredibly cool and, apparently, endlessly watchable. The film’s late-70s Parisian setting indulges in the same fashionable, intoxicating cool as last year’s phenomenal porn-industry slasher Knife+Heart, except without all the pesky murders getting in the way of the fun. Even with all that shameless nostalgia driving its every decision, the film somehow comes across as effortlessly charming and, more surprisingly, very much of the moment.

Alma Jodorowsky stars as a fictional synthpop composer in late-70s Paris, an amalgamated character designed to pay tribute to the real-life women who weren’t properly credited for developing the analog-synth sound. At only 80 minutes, the movie is a short & sweet day-in-the-life portrait of this made-up pioneer synth composer. We watch her perform her morning exercises (cigarette in mouth, of course), switch on her wall of heavy-duty synth equipment (with an accompanying, satisfying buzz as the machines fire up), and go about her day creating songs while attempting to pay her bills. Our Moog-wielding heroine occasionally clashes against music industry sexists who devalue her work, but this is mostly a film about process. We’re treated to a crash-course demonstration of what individual pieces of her mysterious equipment do in creating a full synthpop sound, how an individual synthpop song is built from scratch, and what bands were important in inspiring these early analog synth experiments: DEVO, Kraftwerk, Throbbing Gristle, Tangerine Dream, Suicide, etc. It’s all very laidback, unrushed, and effortlessly cool (especially if you watch the film with a nice pair of headphones).

Le Choc du Futur stumbles into its of-the-moment relevancy in a very roundabout way. Synthpop (and most subsequent electronic music) is a very private, insular artform – especially in the composition stage. It’s the quintessential bedroom music, a craft that’s usually honed while artists are left alone in their workspaces tinkering with their toys. I’m not sure if you’re aware that the world is ending outside right now, but a lot of us have been holed up inside our homes busying ourselves with similar self-satisfying art projects in an effort to stay sane. The only reason I was able to watch this movie in the first place is because the SXSW film festival was cancelled due to COVID-19 concerns and temporarily moved to Amazon Prime as a public service. In that specific, ongoing cultural context, there is something incredibly relatable & satisfying about watching a character work tirelessly alone in their apartment on niche art & go-nowhere projects no one else in the world seems to care about.

It absolutely sucks that women musicians were not properly credited for their contributions to early synth compositions in the 1970s, and Le Choc du Futur is a lovely tribute to the work they created. The film is also just an aesthetically pleasing primer for new-to-the-table fans of the artists & songs that defined that era. More practically, though, this movie is a very comfortable, relatable watch for the current moment we’re struggling through – a snapshot of a D.I.Y. artist creating music for her own satisfaction, despite the crushing odds of the commercial music & marketing industries that do not value her work. Businessmen frequently enter her apartment to disrupt her creative art-for-its-own-sake workflow with concerns & disagreements about her music’s commercial viability, but she mostly blocks out their interference just like how her cheap, tattered curtains block out the sun. We hardly ever see her leave the apartment (except for a couple brief, round-the-block walks), but she uses her confounding wall of heavy-machinery music equipment to go on adventures of her own design, as if she were standing behind the control panel of a spaceship. Le Choc du Futur is the perfect 2020 quarantine movie in that way, even if it was intended to evoke an entirely different era.

-Brandon Ledet

Meeting Nash The Slash at the Vampire-Infested Donut Shop

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One of the most immediately fascinating aspects of September’s Movie of the Month, the Gen-X vampire slacker drama Blood & Donuts, is its “Music By” credit for a musician known simply as Nash the Slash. It’s taken us years of patient scouring to finally access this forgotten low-energy horror gem on a legitimate streaming platform, which has afforded it an allure as an esoteric cult curio. Given its sub-professional budget, its dodgy distribution, and its bit role participation from Canadian horror legend David Cronenberg, the film flirts with the same regional cinema Canuxploitation territory as gems like The Pit, The Gate, and Cathy’s Curse. It makes sense, then, that it would be scored by local weirdo musician known almost exclusively to Torontonians – the enigmatic Nash the Slash. His work on the film is a drowsy, industrial guitar-driven post-rock soundtrack that matches its weirdly melancholic mood, but there was still something about his name that suggested he’d be more exciting as a persona than what those atmospheric sounds were letting on. Nash the Slash did not disappoint.

Maybe he wasn’t playing guitar at all? Jeff “Nash the Slash” Plewman was a versatile musician who was best known for playing electric violin, electric mandolin, and various percussive instruments he would mysteriously describe as “devices” in his liner notes. After abandoning a non-starter of a rockstar career fronting the prog band FM, he turned his interest in music into a kind of performance art. Appearing onstage exclusively in mummy-like bandages (often accessorized with a top hat & steam punk goggles), Nash the Slash used the mystery of his identity & the Silent Era horror looks of his costuming to drum up press coverage of his atmospheric New Wave compositions (press that struggled to reach past the confines of Toronto). He developed an interest in scoring films after performing live accompaniment to Silent Era horror classics like Nosferatu & Un chien andelou, which eventually led to a few notable modern horror gigs like Blood & Donuts & Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood on top of his regular pop music output.

Given his penchant for trolling local Toronto press, the strong iconography of his stage gear, and the esoteric allure of his performance art compositions, it’s incredible that Nash the Slash hadn’t broken through to a wider audience, at least to music nerds outside Canada. If for nothing else, I’m super thankful to Blood & Donuts for leading me to such a distinctly bizarre weirdo, whose contributions to the film are a kind of post-New Wave, pre-drone metal industrial guitar rock that really helps solidify its sleepy, melancholic tone. It was frustrating to me as a curious potential fan that he had never received the weirdo-musician documentary treatment afforded to similar artists like Frank Sidebottom & Daniel Johnston, but it turns out that won’t be the case for long. A successful Indiegogo campaign has crowd-funded a Nash the Slash doc titled And You Thought You Were Normal, due sometime in early 2020. I look forward to learning more about this masked enigma then, but for now it’s just been fun digging through the music video scraps of his visual art I can find on YouTube, a rabbit hole I strongly advise falling into:

For more on September’s Movie of the Month, the Gen-X Canuxploitation vampire drama Blood & Donuts (1995), check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, this look at its unlikely symmetry with Tangerine (2015), and last week’s discovery of its campy horror-comedy equivalent Attack of the Killer Donuts (2016).

-Brandon Ledet

Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story (2019)

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My first exposure to the iconography & persona of the cult British comedian Frank Sidebottom was in the 2014 black comedy Frank, where he was portrayed by Michael Fassbender in a Fleischer cartoon-style paper mâché mask that he never removed onscreen. It turns out that luchadorian gimmick of never appearing in public unmasked is just about the only detail from the “real” Frank Sidebottom’s life that was at all factual. The appeal for savvier (and, let’s face it, British) audiences in seeing a documentary about Chris Sievey, the musician behind the Frank character, is in finally getting a peak under that mask to learn about the artist who created it after decades of cheeky mystery. The appeal for relative newcomers like myself, lured in by the Fassbender film or the Pop Art iconography of the Frank mask on the poster, is just learning about the Frank Sidebottom art project in the first place. What was Frank’s whole deal? Why do a specific subset of British pop culture nerds care so much about a decades-long bit built on a single sight gag – a sinisterly cutesy paper mâché mask? In either case, whether you’re looking to learn about Frank Sidebottom or about Chris Sievey, Being Frank is a definitive, helpfully informative documentation of both characters from start to end.

In the early goings-on of the film, it appears as if Sievey were a Daniel Johnston-type figure: a troubled young Beatles fanatic who lost his goddamned mind inside his own weirdo art after a few youthful experiments with LSD. Survey’s self-obsessive back catalog of home movies, Outsider Art drawings, and moldy cassette recordings of early music projects certainly recall the raw material of the wonderful documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston, but comparing the two artists’ personal lives in a direct 1:1 parallel does them both a disservice. Despite how he was portrayed in Frank– which is now clearly a work of fiction – Sievey was not some mentally ill free spirit who lost his true persona inside the Frank costume. A few myth-building interviewees in the documentary (mostly art dealers & punk scenesters) will try to convince the audience that there was no telling where Sievey ended & Frank began, that their personae were inextricable. That doesn’t seem to be true to the family & friends who knew Sievey well, though, the same way a luchador or an Andy Kaufman type would only drop the bit once in private. Give or take a decades-long bout with alcoholism, there wasn’t anything especially mysterious or enigmatic about Chris Sievey as a human being. He was just an incredibly driven, meticulous artist who wanted to turn his passion for songwriting into a lucrative profession, and Frank was his best chance to make that dream happen.

In that way, Sievey most reminds me of the microbudget backyard filmmaker & songwriter Matt Farley, who regularly churns out a massive flood of multimedia content for a small crowd of dedicated fans. So much about Sievey’s feverish commitment to the Frank Sidebottom project is distinctly Farleyesque: his aggressive self-promotion, his habitual publication of his personal phone number, his detailed record of his personal sports stats (in this case, revolving around a minor league soccer team), his obsessively fussed-over hand-drawn zines, his absurd dedication to prideful small-town localism (in this case, the village of Timperley). That’s not a sign of madness or possessed genius. It’s just a driven artist with a superhuman work ethic. Sievey’s story affords Being Frank drama & pathos in other ways, though. There’s a heartbreaking story to tell here about a fame-focused artist who almost made it big as a Legitimate Musician (most notably with his sarcastically chipper New Wave group The Freshies) only to be overshadowed by a paper mâché novelty act of his own creation. There’s even more heartbreak in interviews with his close family who had to suffer his self-absorbed bullshit whenever he’d put his various projects over their day to day wellbeing – which is always the risk when you love or depend on an artist. I just think framing Sievey as an outsider weirdo instead of a tireless, hardworking showman is doing his artistry a disservice, and I’m saying that as someone who still loves the movie Frank for its own merits as a work of fiction.

Maybe you’d disagree with me and believe Sievey to be a mad, tortured genius who lost himself inside Frank’s paper mâché head. Maybe you wouldn’t think he’s a genius or an impressively productive artist, but rather a half-arsed troll who lucked into a pre-Internet meme that happened to pay his (many, long overdue) bills. Whatever the case, Being Frank does Chris Sievey the service of contextualizing Frank as just one (wildly successful) project in the artist’s decades-spanning portfolio, offering a fairly comprehensive view of who both Frank & Sievey were separate from one another. It’s a thorough document of a bizarro art project and a necessary counterbalance to the fictional mythmaking that’s sprung up around it.

-Brandon Ledet