Saturday, Sunday, Surréalité

Running Time: 4:33

Released On: "Nuestra Mùsica | JLG"  - Various Artists (15 tracks)

Label: Institute For Alien Research

Release Date: 3rd December 2019

Format: Download

Buy Link: Bandcamp

After a mere five weeks together, Skit and I took on our third musique concrète challenge from Shaun Robert's IFAR label. The theme: Jean-Luc Godard. I was a bit young to fully appreciate French new wave cinema the first time around, I was only 9 when his offbeat masterpiece, "Weekend", was released, I came to it later. I think I got interested after seeing the 1983 McBride version of "Breathless" with Richard Gere and Valérie Kaprisky. Having enjoyed that immensely, I got curious about the original, Godard's "À Bout De Souffle" with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. Even accepting that everything sounds way cooler in French anyway, I loved it. I was hooked. When it came to this project, Skit and I scoured the internet for old trailers of Godard's movies, taking samples by the dozen from that original; clips of soundtrack music, Parisienne traffic, Jean Seberg shouting "New York Herald Tribune" et al. However, then we found the original French trailer for "Weekend", which so captures that liberated spirit of '67, think 'feature length episode of The Monkees TV show with lots of car crashes, cannibal hippy revolutionaries and a seriously insightful commentary on class and privilege, in French.' Again, we milked it for samples of crashes and drums and dialogue, until we got to the bit with the cellos. Sigh. I confess, I have a very deep affection for bowed strings. Skit, on the other hand, likes the sound they make when underneath a chainsaw. But he was also still teaching me about digital techniques and, thankfully, saw this as another opportunity for me to learn, so I got to do a delightfully hissy piece with cellos! We had a deeply philosophical debate about whether or not it could count as musique concrète, seeing as how it was recordings of real musical instruments, but Shaun Robert was happy with it, so that settled it. This was always something I would be drawn back to, and I somehow had a feeling all the other samples we had collected wouldn't go to waste either.

o

LINK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_Godard

OSTRACISM