Red Rainbows

admin — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Sarah Lipstate has all the makings of a feminist noise fan’s dream. At twenty-five, she plays in ensembles with now-graying heroes of New York’s avant garde scene, like Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham. She recently joined new wave band Cold Cave after a stint in Parts & Labor. And solo, under the name Noveller, she coaxes ambient drone from a double-necked guitar.

Red Rainbows follows debut album Paint on the Shadows, which was released in a tiny batch of vinyl in April, and its centerpiece “St. Powers” appears on both. “St. Powers” both anchors and overshadows the rest of Red Rainbows, as its pipe organ-like throb and finger-picked chime exudes an Arthur Russell-like resolve that dissonant above-the-frets scratching can’t dampen. Eleven minutes in, what sounds like a thumb piano begins to skid atop the bowed guitar, and the song neatly closes with a gorgeous melody that seems borrowed from Tortoise.

Lipstate constructs a grandiose, Chatham-like lake of guitar fuzz with “Rainbows,” but the tones fade out just as they begin to coalesce into something unsettling. The meandering, metallic chill of “Brilliant Colors” might befit a night flight over a canyon, but sounds aimless on the heels of “Rainbows” and is at its best when its twiddled knobs and sawed strings give way to an irregular beat and occasional silence. On “Bends,” with the help of collaborator (and No Fun founder) Carlos Giffoni, Lipstate mines a repeated shift between a simple rhythm and a cicada-like din. Two repeated notes suggest a table saw whirring under-load. A sing-songy guitar line tantalizingly suggests a broken punk rock record that, with a push of the needle, will break out of its hiccuping sterility.

But the music on Red Rainbows seldom does break out. By far the album’s most patient, evocative, and ambitious piece, “St. Powers” is the only one that doesn’t sound safe in its obtuseness, and is the only piece that routinely threatens to collapse on itself. Red Rainbows might as well be Noveller’s debut to a wider audience, thanks to the minuscule pressing of her first LP, and it makes sense that Lipstate would want that wider audience to hear a standout song—but the album remains perplexing in its structure.

The noise and drone scene has long since been canonized by a cultural patriarchy of aging, ego-laden, middle- to high-brow males; its heroes alternately conduct orchestras at public monuments and rock out to corporate sponsorships. So what is the role of young female musicians?

At times on Red Rainbows Lipstate begins to dismantle her own genre assumptions, many of which rely heavily on masculine codes, but at others she adheres to them to generate barren soundscapes that pass without leaving much of an impression. It’s clear from the album that Noveller is capable of creating discomfiting, urgent, and beautiful music that may be more relevant and inspired than its influences.

Written by: Sam Schulz, December 11th 2009

Mutluluk

admin — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

Directed by Abdullah Oguz

First Run Features

In his first few shots, all very wide angles and washed-out greens, Abdullah Oguz shows his cards as an ambitious, technically brilliant filmmaker. In the Anatolian countryside, a flock of sheep turns a slow circle as the camera, peering down on a girl’s body, does the same. A melody—composed by Zülfü Livaneli, who also wrote the book on which this film was based—hums through the valley. A shepherd picks up the girl, and so begins Mutluluk.

The characters in a village drama are executing by rote what, as a character glibly explains later, circumstances demanded: Young Meryem (Özgü Namal) has been raped. Her father reluctantly submits to cousin Ali Riza Amen (Mustafa Avkiran) insistence she be killed to mitigate the family’s shame. When Ali Riza’s son Cemal (Murat Han) returns from military service, he begrudgingly takes the girl to Istanbul in order to carry out his father’s sentence. But he can't carry it out, and after his last-minute change of heart, Cemal and Meryem flee Istanbul and Ali Riza’s henchmen. Aimless after a stint at a remote fishery on the Mediterranean, on a whim the young cousins join a stranger named Irfan (Talat Belet), who has fled his wife and professorship for a yachting joy-ride around the Aegean.

From there, the film devolves into maudlin lectures on beauty, purity, and love, giving its stars little room to develop their broadly drawn characters; Cemal swings between stoically surly and jealously unhinged, Irfan acts predictably free-spirited, and for the most part Meryem hangs back meekly. Fortunately, the lectures are lent some credence by the wide-angle attention that cinematographer Mirsad Herovic pays the seascapes and craggy shores and by the adaptable actors’ still game performances.

However, some of Mutluluk most powerful scenes become its most disappointing because the dramatic confrontations they stage prove neither earned nor transformative. Oguz saves the identity of Meryem’s rapist as a minor and unnecessary shocker for the end, and he pulls too many tricks to convey intensity: sped up tracking shots, sudden switches to black and white, barrages of extreme facial close-ups.

Such clutter is doubly frustrating because Oguz is a gifted storyteller with a knack for expansive imagery—fenced-in fishes, an elevated expressway—and an affection for his characters. Thanks to the tenderness with which he imbues even mundane exchanges, Mutluluk develops almost imperceptibly from a tale of sheltered villagers struggling with imposed moral codes into one of dear friends negotiating their personal senses of duty. While Meryem stumbles headlong past the sites of her rape and would-be murder, the film moves gorgeous and delicately alongside toward some seafaring redemption.

Written by: Sam Schulz, December 7th 2009