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music, reviews, swedish

>SRM Reviews (#66 November 2009)

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>Published in Sweden Rock Magazine #66 November 2009.

Ataraxy
Rotten Shit – 8/10
Demo CD-R

Herrejävlar! Efter att ha tvingats igenom tre svenska, finlemmade döds- och blackproduktioner är det en fröjd att dänga på spanska Ataraxys Rotten Shit-demo och bara spy ner sig själv fullständigt. Ljudet äter sig genom hjärnan likt ett gäng överfeta likmaskar som inte kan få nog i sin eviga jakt på död och förruttnelse. Så fett! Så skitigt! Man baxnar.
Låtmaterialet går heller inte av för hackor. Helvete vad man baxnar! De vet ex-jävla-akt hur låtarna ska byggas upp för att lille Indy ska gå ner i spagat, förbanna gudarna och dricka din mammas blod.
Och jag älskar band som hyllar känslan och viljan framför den musikaliska perfektionen. De skulle kunna göra tusen omtagningar och få trummorna perfekta, men hur tråkigt blir inte det? Astråkigt givetvis. Det här är äkta. Inget trams. Zombiesnubben på omslaget har tygmärken med Nihilist och Nirvana 2002. Stil och klass!
Jag är redan nervös för att de ska ha ”finat till sig” inför albumsläppet.
Låt det icke ske!

———-

Mr. Death
Detached From Life – 6/10
Agonia (Sound Pollution)

Jag siktar en nygammal generation gammeldödsmanglare i Svedala!
Efter det att ynglingarna i Invidious, Tribulation, Morbus Chron och Gravehammer sparkade liv i liket på ett strålande sätt kan man nu skåda ett gäng rangliga gubbar med förflutet i diverse tidiga orkestrar som återigen har plockat upp yxorna. Bombs of Hades och Tormented är de som ligger mig varmast om hjärtat. Och nu har vi här Mr. Death, med medlemmar från bland annat Treblinka och Expulsion. Ett uselt bandnamn, men vad göra när allt annat är upptaget och förbrukat? Och snubbarna ser för fan ut som korthåriga IT-konsulter! Man vet inte vad man ska tro, så man får lyssna.
Och det låter riktigt bra. Grottig, murken dödsmetall som sällan lämnar motorvägen, och som har Det med stort D – även om man ibland får gräva djupt för att finna. De kunde måhända ha rensat bland materialet, för just nu känns en fullängdare i längsta laget. Ändå: så oerhört mycket bättre än mycket annat i skivbackarna.

literature

>Now reading: Nick Cave

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>


I’ve been listening to Nick Cave for many years, but only a few of his albums – which is kind of odd. There are still loads of records by The Birthday Party, The Bad Seeds and Grinderman that I haven’t heard yet. I guess too much of this kind of music is just… too much.
Let Love In (1994) and Murder Ballads (1996) were given almost weekly spins at my place a couple of years ago. The one album I prefer the most though is The Proposition (2005), the soundtrack to the fantastic film which he did with his fellow Bad Seeder Warren Ellis. They also collaborated on the music to the film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), and they’re doing the same thing for The Road (2009). Can’t wait for that one!

As for his books I only recently got to read them, and I like them a lot. His debut, And The Ass Saw The Angel (1989), is a tough read, though. The language is complex and very poetic, and thus the story becomes hard for me to grasp – especially since English is not my native language. It was only after I read some reviews and articles about the text that I started to like it.
What others had to say:

 This novel is strong enough to provoke nightmares and make the hardiest reader reflect on the human condition at it’s worst and most pathetic.

[…]
The empathy that pours forth from the reader while Euchrid’s tale is told is so powerful and overwhelming — I can’t even begin to describe how I felt while reading this book. And the ending — the ending! All I can say is that it’s a masterpiece. The bitterness towards religious fanaticism is so sweet — at least it was for me. I’m very bitter towards religion and Christianity, and this book just seemed to justify it.
[…]
And all is told with an almost prophetic Biblical tone, with infinite foreboding and dark overtones.

The second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro (2009), is an easy read. I finished it in one weekend and even though it may seem more shallow than his debut, it certainly has a lot of depth. At least it got my mind going. In short, it’s about sex addiction.
What others had to say:

 This novel is bound to spark lots of different reactions because it is provocative and explicit and strange and dangerous and incredibly funny and genuinely challenging. But I hope that the beauty of the writing and the seriousness of the book’s moral dimensions are not overlooked because of the ‘controversial’ aspects of the novel. For this second novel by Nick Cave is a major piece of literature that makes so much of what is being written today in this country look anodyne and flaccid.

[—]
Like a modern day Bukowski, Nick Cave’s post-beat gen road trip takes a journey through hell and back, through reckless sex and restless grief and loathing…

Check out some excerpts from the audiobook here, and since Cave and Ellis have composed a soundtrack to the book, you get to hear their amazing music as well.

movies

>Stockholm International Film Festival

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>The Stockholm International Film Festival has always been a pleasure. Last year I couldn’t go due to various reasons, but this time I’ll do my best not to miss out on some of the experience.

My best year was in 2003, when I had the pleasure of interviewing director Royston Tan (featured in the paper edition of Ny Moral #1). We hung out quite a bit, and watching his film, 15 – The Movie, was amazing after having spoken with him about it. I don’t think I would’ve enjoyed it as much if I hadn’t known the background, the struggle and all the madness surrounding the creation of the film.
The movie’s plot synopsis reads like this:
Fast, frenetic, and furious, 15 is the story of five Singaporian teenagers who, abandoned by the system and estranged from their parents and life in general, build their own world in which gangs, drugs, fighting, piercing, self-harm and suicide are common and brotherhood is important above all else.

Royston is a huge fan of Roy Andersson, and somehow somebody managed to get us invited to Roy Andersson’s studio, Studio 24, and that was really interesting, since I’m a huge fan of Roy as well. We got to see some of his sets and his private cinema, and I also became friends with the producer of Sånger från andra våningen [Songs from the Second Floor], Lisa Alwert. I was supposed to interview her later on, but somehow that went down the drain. She’s got some wild stories about the production which I haven’t read anything about elsewhere. Maybe that’ll show up in Ny Moral #2…
We hung out a bit with Roy as well, but he really didn’t say much. Good guy, though.

I also exchanged a few words with David Lynch at Lydmar Hotel (check it out if you ever come to Stockholm, they have the coolest elevator!). I don’t remember what we said. He is one of my idols, so I guess I got starstruck.
All I could think of was what his big hair would look like after a shower… Weird.

I also got to see Ong Bak, Goodbye Lenin, Aillen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer, The Grudge 1 & 2, Prozac Nation, The Station Agent, Internal Affairs and Memories of Murder – all very watchable films (well, maybe not the Grudge films…). The worthless “graffiti” movie Bomb The System and the pretty dull and disappointing The Cooler are now erased from my memory.

In 2002 I had my most memorable cinematic experience ever. Gaspar Noé‘s sickening film Irréversible really fucked with my mind. The opening sequence with the spinning camera, the evil sounds (Gaspar uses infrasounds that cause awe and fear to make people extra anxious), the disturbing images, the intensity… A lot of people left the theater after ten minutes. Even more left during the infamous rape scene. The ones who stayed until the end were rewarded with a very good film. But remember, it’s a whole different thing watching that stuff in a good theater with superhigh volume, sick surround sounds and these huge images attacking your eyes, compared to watching it at home. I’m really glad I got to see it then and there.
It won the Best Film award that year, which is pretty brave, because it really is an unpleasant movie. Even though I think the quality of the films has been lower over the recent years, they knew the game back then. They realized that it was a very good movie, even though it was highly controversial. I like that, and I hope they will bring that vibe back someday.

This year is the 20th edition of the Sthlm International Film Festival, and so far I only get to see four or five films. Hopefully they will blow my mind as well.

The Road
I read the book in 2006 when it came out and it was easily the best book I had read in a long, long time. It’s still one of my all time favourites. I wrote about it here.
I hope the movie has the same darkness, the same emptiness, the same uncontrollable combination of uncertainty and hope, and of course the same love.

The Limits of Control
Jim Jarmusch has never disappointed me, and I love how this movie is described in the press: Lights! Camera! Inaction!
As a fan of minimalism, film art and Jim Jarmusch this one should hit the spot for me.

Dogtooth
I have a feeling this one will be both scary and funny. The Fritzl theme brings the darkness. The absurdity brings the joy.

Waiting Room
A short film.
And I’m a sucker for gas masks.
And the plot synopsis rules:
The predicament of man forced to live in an immense void surrounded by nothing but waste, emptiness and degradation. A young man wearing a gas mask wanders through the deserted streets of a crumbling city. Only a few people – all male – still roam the streets and frequent the coffee shops. The anonymous young man is an existentialist hero in a world where man has been robbed of all purpose.

The Road

The Limits of Control

Dogtooth

Waiting Room

politics

>Why we fight

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>Why do people think that just because you give voice to one opinion of one political party, you’re down 100% with that specific party? Just a disclaimer, because I’m not down with any party. So therefore, here’s some old school communism for ya, the way I like it: classy! Because if there’s gonna be a class war, I’d like it classy…

Johannes Jäger made me aware of this one. Check his blogg (in Swedish) here.

art, movies

>Modern film posters

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>Yes, modern film posters are ugly as hell. I guess that’s representative for shallow and soulless lives lead by bastards who want everything served on a silver platter. This is beyond doubt the age of stupid in every possible way. People are lazy fucks. People are stupid fucks. I could continue on…
However, there are of course some people who defy the laws of tradition (Primus pun intended – check the jam here, its’ awesome!) and create what in my mind is good looking shit.
Here are some posters and designs created by allcity. They would be even better looking without the ugly review quotes, but this is about as clean as it gets, and that’s the way I like it. The unused ones are in my opinion way better than the ones that were chosen in the end.
It’s all a matter of taste…

Unused.

Unused.

Unused.

Unused.

Unused.

Unused.
art, movies, politics

>Czech film posters

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>

Thanks to my man Hynek Pallas I discovered the Czech Film Posters website.
I’m hooked.

Related posts about poster art
Malleus

Stolen text from the Czech Film Posters website:
“Following a communist take-over in 1948, Czechoslovakia was ruled by a totalitarian regime for over forty years. The level of oppression varied throughout the period – the stifling Stalinist practices of the 1950s gradually gave way to a more liberal rule in the 1960s. But the 1968 Prague Spring movement to break free from the leash held by the Kremlin was brutally supressed by the Red Army in August. The following period of darkness – referred to by the regime as “the process of normalisation” – gradually lightened with the onset of Gorbachev’s Perestrojka in the mid 1980s. Like most other Central European communist regimes the Czech one fell in 1989 during the wave of changes set off by the powerfully symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall.

[…]
The decision on which foreign films could be approved for cinema distribution and which local artists could be allowed to make Czech and Slovak films was totally up to the authorities.
The attitudes of the censors rode the same waves as the regime in general.
[…]
Following the Russian invasion in 1968 and the subsequent occupation, the 1970s saw a new tightening of the censorship screw, but it largely concentrated on the local scene and foreign films continued to slip through the iron curtain. Czechoslovak film-goers could see a number of European club movies (Bergman, Fellini, Visconti), more than a few US blockbusters (The Sting, Jaws, Marathon Man, Saturday Night Fever, Kramer v. Kramer, Alien and others) and a good crop of conspiracy theory thrillers (The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men). The communist authorities liked the latter for their exposure of the rot in the Western world.
[…]
But it took until the early 1990s for the Czechoslovak screens to finally see the light shining through such seminal rolls of celluloid such as Dr. Strangelove, The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Wings of Desire not to mention any of the James Bond movies or any other film with Russian baddies.
[…]
Due to the high cost, film posters were rarely imported with the film – a smaller number of French film posters being the exception – and so from the early days it was the local artists who were given the task of creating images to get bums on cinema seats. The Czech film poster of the 1920s and 1930s almost exclusively used realistically painted characters and scenes from the film and screamed the names of its stars often in letters larger than those of the film’s title. Notable exceptions to the rule were Atelier Rotter’s Art Deco works and Frantisek Zelenka’s Modernist designs for the Werich & Voskovec films.
Towards the end of the 1930s, photos of the main character started appearing in the film poster design – usually on a painted background, complemented by lettering created by the poster’s designer. The film poster art lost most of its bite and glamour during the Nazi occupation when the film industry was under the complete control of the German authorities and films in the cinemas were either German or heavily censored Czech productions.
[…]
The decade between 1948 and 1958 was dominated by communist propaganda in all aspects of life and film was one of its main tools.
[…]
The 1960s became the golden age of the Czech film poster. It was a period in which the relative artistic freedom enjoyed by the artists gelled with a range of other factors such as a unique concentration of talent, a wave of new and inspirational films coming from both home and abroad and closer links with the international art world. This cocktail of ability, inspiration and attractive topics to work on gave birth to a collection of hundreds of highly original and inovative film posters that stand apart from the main stream of the genre. While the American and Western European film poster primarily served the film, in Czech and Polish film poster art it was – with a bit of exaggeration – the film that served the poster in the sense that the poster developed into an art form in its own right. It was still used to promote the film but the art of the poster went far beyond the mere capture of the public’s attention. Another factor that enhanced the perception of the Czech film poster as a work of art rather than a purely promotional vehicle was the fact that the text on the poster was usually limited to the film title, name of director and the leading actors – no logos of film distributors and sponsors, quotes lifted from reviews, studio information etc.
[…]
The decade of hope ended with the Russian invasion in August 1968. The newly appointed pro-Kremlin government turned one of its searchlights on the arts and entertainment. Paranoid aparatchiks searched for anti-communist propaganda where there was none – film poster designs submitted by artists were often rejected or had to be reworked for bizarre reasons. In her article “Czech Film Poster from 1945 until today” published in the book Czech Film Poster of the 20th century, Marta Sylvestrova writes about a commissioning editor getting fired because of a claim by a communist official that the space between the legs of elephants pictured on a poster for the film “Surrounded by Elephants” looked like a swastika. According to Sylvestrova Zdenek Ziegler was interviewed by the secret police about where he got the 100 USD banknote he used in his design for the 100 Rifles poster and Josef Vyletal had to obscure the US flag on the back of Henry Fonda’s jacket with smoke from one of the passing motorbikes on his poster for Easy Rider.”