Stephen McClurg's Blog, page 34

“The Brain Destroys the Animal”: New Stull Track

Stull exists in two realms: One is as a improv rock trio and the other is as a recording project based on a process that begins with Tracy’s percussion/field recordings. You can hear them woven together in the Stullification playlist.

When we’re in a room together, I mostly play bass. On these recordings, I play bass and a variety of keys, midi, and whatnot.

A lot of what I went for on this one was, as usual, based on Tracy’s track and the lyrics he has at the end of the song. I wanted to base what I did on that core, and wrote a song for the opening of the track. His track felt like almost a sci-fi / Ligotti–kind of thing. I wanted to capture that from a different perspective.

I don’t know if Thomas Ligotti ever collaborates or jams with anyone, so I was thinking of his sensibilities filtered through The Residents–or something like that.

The new track is below.

I got asked a few times about the lyrics. Here they are:

They sing of the many 
Faultlines in the brain,
But the song remains
Plugging up my drain.

Burnt my foot onstage
DJing at the rave.
We stopped to watch it burn
A brilliant neon pain.

Let me fall, let me fast,
Take my foot up off the gas.
There’s no time like the past,
And there never has been. 

Let me fall, let me fast,
Take my foot up off the gas.
If my dreams came true,
What else would I do?

She said tattoos and love
Were becoming a bore.
They both left you feeling
A little raw, a little sore.

What stops my heart 
From beating on the page?
And why can’t I keep 
My soul from being late?

"The Brain Destroys the Animal": New Stull Track

Stull exists in two realms: One is as a improv rock trio and the other is as a recording project based on a process that begins with Tracy’s percussion/field recordings. You can hear them woven together in the Stullification playlist.

When we’re in a room together, I mostly play bass. On these recordings, I play bass and a variety of keys, midi, and whatnot.

A lot of what I went for on this one was, as usual, based on Tracy’s track and the lyrics he has at the end of the song. I wanted to base what I did on that core, and wrote a song for the opening of the track. His track felt like almost a sci-fi / Ligotti–kind of thing. I wanted to capture that from a different perspective.

I don’t know if Thomas Ligotti ever collaborates or jams with anyone, so I was thinking of his sensibilities filtered through The Residents–or something like that.

The new track is below.

I got asked a few times about the lyrics. Here they are:

They sing of the many 
Faultlines in the brain,
But the song remains
Plugging up my drain.

Burnt my foot onstage
DJing at the rave.
We stopped to watch it burn
A brilliant neon pain.

Let me fall, let me fast,
Take my foot up off the gas.
There’s no time like the past,
And there never has been. 

Let me fall, let me fast,
Take my foot up off the gas.
If my dreams came true,
What else would I do?

She said tattoos and love
Were becoming a bore.
They both left you feeling
A little raw, a little sore.

What stops my heart 
From beating on the page?
And why can’t I keep 
My soul from being late?

From the Eunoia Archives: The Terror Test: Test Prep #10

Originally written for The Terror Test. Check out their new website. I am now writing Lost in Arhkam. Previous Test Prep essays. 

This was written for an episode that was part of the podcast’s semester abroad covering Mystics in Bali (1981) and Three … Extremes (2004).

Tremolo: Sweet Chariot of the Gods

Contains Mystics of Bali spoilers.

My first experience of Mystics in Bali was the croaked commands–part Yoda, part Wicked Witch– of the Leyak (or Leak) Queen. I played bass in a surf band and was listening to our new album. Our main songwriter added the Mystics sample on “Blood of Kingu.” I knew nothing about the movie except this sample and that I had to see it.

The leyak, like Kingu, a Babylonian deity, fit nicely into our theoretical soundscape inhabited by Lovecraftian Old Ones. Surf music is known for its created worlds. More famously, Man or Astro-Man? mined science-fiction, a sci-fi of cheap labs in low budget Cold War-era movies, of Space Age textbooks brought to life on stage. Daikaiju, as the name suggests, express themselves through a world of giant monsters. Certain forefathers of these bands at the intellectual end would be Devo or the Residents, in which a philosophy is expressed that hints at an alternate universe. Another form, more surface, would be the “gang” imagery of matching jackets and uniforms in the Ramones or The Ventures.

Surf’s imaginary worlds spin in the same solar system as lounge and exotica, with satellites like “crime jazz.” Likewise, I consider Mystics in a category of films that I call horror fantastique. Horror fantastique would cover peculiar horror films that have elements of the fantastic, the strange, the surreal, the absurd. These are films like Hausu (1977), Society (1989), and Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977). They incorporate elements of exploitation, art film, and frequently have low budgets. Various types of effects are often used to create the strange quality of the world on screen: in-camera FX, puppets, strings, post-production lasers, double exposure, etc. Sometimes it’s likely, especially in the cases of Hausu and Mystics, that as an American, there are elements that seem strange to me because of cultural differences.

Mystics is in some ways about these differences. The plot revolves around Cathy, an Australian who wants to learn powerful leyak magic and write a book about it. She’s in a relationship with a native named Mahendra, who operates like a fixer; he figures out who she needs to meet and tries to get her there. She not only wants to understand the Other, but become the Other.

Cathy gains access to the Leyak Queen, who then must gain access to Cathy’s body and mind in order for Cathy to learn everything she can. When the leyak uses Cathy’s body, she mostly uses her head, which detaches and floats through the air while organs dangle below, similar to the penanggalan of Malaysian folklore. The leyak has fangs, which make it easier to suck the blood of newborn–or not-yet-born–babies, of course. One could read the film as an example in which the leyak exploits Cathy’s body similar to how the bodies of Africa and the East have been exploited by the West. The Leyak Queen’s ultimate goal is to gain immortality and power and then discard Cathy. When she is inhabited by the leyak, she is not able to use her brain or body; she becomes a conduit that the leyak exploits for her own benefit.

The conduit for surf music has traditionally been the guitar. Surf has a foundation in American rock’n’roll, but the rhythms and melodies used in surf are often played to sound “exotic.” In a similar way, but like a reversal of surf music and exotica, Mystics uses Balian folklore (the exotic melody) to tell the story of an exploitation horror film (the guitar, in this metaphor). Evil is defeated as it is so often in American horror films. But the evil here is represented as either woman or Western.

Like instrumental surf music, Mystics in Bali and what I call horror fantastique, are not going to be for everyone. People may wait for someone to start singing over a Dick Dale tune the same way they may wait for a film like Hausu to make sense. That particular listener is going to have to wait a long time or will just be disappointed and likely find something more immediately pleasurable. Not that Mystics is a great movie, but it is unique and fun. Some of us, for better or worse, are like Cathy. We hear the call of surf’s tremolo picking or the caw of the Leyak Queen as a promise of a fantastic world that we have to experience.

From the Eunoia Archives: The Terror Test: Test Prep #9

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do in the First Place

Originally written for The Terror Test. Check out their new website. I am now writing Lost in Arhkam. Previous Test Prep essays. 

This was written before the current fires in Australia for an episode covering Wolf Creek (2005) and The Babadook (2014).

“The correspondent wondered ingenuously how in the name of all that was sane could there be people who thought it amusing to row a boat. It was not an amusement; it was a diabolical punishment, and even a genius of mental aberrations could never conclude that it was anything but a horror to the muscles and a crime against the back.” ~ Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat”

“One minute we’re having a good time, and now we’re not.” ~ The Reef (2010)

The first stop on Terror Test’s around-the-world virtual field trip of horror is Australia. While it has become cliché to say that everything there will kill you, Australia has had “crisis meetings” about the nation’s horror industry negatively impacting tourism. Wolf Creek (2005) is based on true events surrounding hitchhiker killings, and has been said to have influenced copycat killers. Another film produced by Australia’s burgeoning horror industry, The Pack (2015), depicts some of Australia’s famous deadly wildlife, in this case, feral dogs. Not everyone is against Australia’s horror industry, though. Some say that horror films help tourism in the long run by bringing in people to visit sites similar to popular destinations in America like Amityville or The Stanley Hotel in Colorado, which inspired The Shining. Wolfe Creek National Park, despite the few copycat killers, has become an increasingly popular tourist destination since the film’s debut.

While the guys test Wolf Creek and The Babadook (2014), I’m focusing on my favorite Australian horror film of recent years, which also has the bonus of being a good shark movie: The Reef. Like many horror fans, I grew up with Jaws (1975), and still watch it every year. I even wanted to study sharks because of it. I read every book in the library on the subject and was a pre-Shark Week devourer of documentaries like Blue Water, White Death (1971), by Australian shark authority and shark attack survivor Rodney Fox, who is also responsible for some of the most iconic photography of great whites ever taken. Great white sharks are truly sublime, equally beautiful and terrifying. As a sidenote, Fox consulted on Jaws, and if memory serves, he helped film the cage sequence, in particular.

Kim Newman, in Nightmare Movies, writes that the success of Jaws comes down to its “linear simplicity” and that “All the film does is bite, keep scary, and make little sharks.” By “little sharks,” Newman means all the mostly bad sequels and rip-offs. The Reef can be counted among those little sharks, but it’s surprisingly good. It’s even more simply linear and clocks in sleekly under ninety minutes. The movie is about a group of friends on an overturned boat. They can wait and hope the craft’s seemingly obsolete emergency devices help, or they can swim the twelve or thirteen miles to an island. Most of them opt for that swim, since the boat is sinking anyway. And that’s it. There’s some blame, shame, and guilt, but mostly the film is about going from point A to point B while floating in the ocean with a hungry great white. This simple story manages to produce and maintain a good deal of tension throughout, and it avoids the largest pitfall of most shark films: bad shark effects. How does it manage that? Real sharks.

Where Newman sees Jaws operating on the mythical level of Moby Dick or Old Man and the Sea, I see The Reef operating within the naturalist tradition of Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat.” Naturalism, as a literary movement, looked at the human’s place in the natural world and was influenced by interpretations of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. Naturalist writers, rather than feminizing a nurturing Mother Nature, or seeing humans as some kind of masters of the Earth, tended to write about how the natural world was, at best, indifferent to human beings, and, at worst, hostile to them.

Both “The Open Boat” and The Reef are castaway narratives. Each involves a quartet of characters drifting in the ocean, hopefully toward safety. Both are as much, if not mostly, about the setting and the characters’ relationship to the marine world in which they find themselves. Both are based on true events. In Crane’s story we’re unsure if these characters are going to make it and we don’t get too close to any of the characters. Their boat is falling apart, the seaworthy captain is injured, the seas are rough. It doesn’t look good.

Similarly, in The Reef, we don’t get small town politics like in Jaws and we don’t get family drama, and we don’t get characters like Brody or Quint. In a way, we get a kind of bourgeois retelling of Quint’s Indianapolis speech. Crane’s perspective of a removed, ambivalent third person narrator–with limited access into the correspondent’s thoughts–doesn’t peer inside the other character’s minds. The reader does get to hear and see the reactions the characters have to their setting, though.

In both instances, the setting is the sea and sky. In the movie, the surroundings are stunningly gorgeous, unlike the descriptions of the often “gray” sea in “The Open Boat.” In the same way New York City or the Outback are often said to function as a character, Australian natural beauty amidst the danger and suspense commands much of the show here. In that sense, we’re back to the interesting tension that the conversation about horror and tourism has. Will this scare people, or bring them out?

Shark attack statistics, particularly the low likelihood of being attacked by a shark, are mentioned more than once in The Reef. This, on the one hand, reminds us to get in the water, to enjoy what life has to offer. Combine that with the stunning natural photography and who wouldn’t want to go visit Australia’s wonders? On the other hand, the first time we get reminded about attack statistics is when one of the characters is looking at a wall of shark jaws, similar to the ones Quint prepares in Jaws. It’s a not so subtle reminder of genre. We’re watching a shark movie, so there are going to be sharks. And they have teeth. Lots of teeth.

No matter how irrational, it’s those teeth that keep my boating to a yearly trip around Amity Island. I occasionally venture into the Deep Blue Sea (1999), and now, I may wade out to The Reef on the regular. That’s enough of the water for me.

New Music: Flowerdew’s Timeslip Ensemble

I just finished a track with Scott Bazar and made a playlist over at SoundCloud for our collaborations.

I’ve now played music with Scott for about two decades, and I’m hoping I get to work with him on stage again soon. Some of the most fun I’ve had playing live has been while performing Scott’s improv/video pieces.

I never know what Scott’s going to send me. For example, this track was built from an improvisation he did with a guitar, an equalizer, and battery-powered Christmas lights. One of the earlier tracks we made was built from a similar set-up, but instead of the lights, Scott used a microwave rotator.

I usually hear vocal qualities in his playing, no matter the gear and I tend to build the tracks around that. His work on the improv track that is the basis for “Flowerdew’s Timeslip Ensemble” reminded me of the vocal quality in Javanese music. Initially, I started building a track with that idea, but with the thought of building something like a sound environment that borrowed textures more than scales or songs from Javanese music.

I originally built a low-pitched ohm chant, but never liked how it rested with everything else. Then I heard a kind of marching band sound and developed that track separately and then attempted to make it sound like the band marched through the soundscape.

I was thinking of film music and field recordings along with Charles Ives’ memories of and attempts at recreating two marching bands playing at once. Instead of two similar bands, I wanted to work with dichotomies: noise (density? texture?)/melody, East/West, songs of life/songs of death, stillness/motion, etc.

New Music: Flowerdew's Timeslip Ensemble

I just finished a track with Scott Bazar and made a playlist over at SoundCloud for our collaborations.

I’ve now played music with Scott for about two decades, and I’m hoping I get to play live with him again soon. Some of the most fun I’ve had playing live has been while playing Scott’s improv/video pieces.

I never know what Scott’s going to send me. For example, this track was built from an improvisation he did with a guitar, an equalizer, and battery-powered Christmas lights. One of the earlier tracks we made was built from a similar set-up, but instead of the lights, Scott used a microwave rotator.

I usually hear vocal qualities in his playing, no matter the gear and I tend to build the tracks around that. His playing on the improv track that is the basis for “Flowerdew’s Timeslip Ensemble” reminded me of the vocal quality in Javanese music. Initially, I started building a track with that idea, but with the thought of building something like a sound environment that borrowed textures more than scales or songs from Javanese music.

I originally built a low-pitched ohm chant, but never liked how it rested with everything else. Then I heard a kind of marching band sound and developed that track separately and then attempted to make it sound like the band marched through the soundscape.

I was thinking of film music and field recordings along with Charles Ives’ memories of and attempts at recreating two marching bands playing at once. Instead of two similar bands, I wanted to work with dichotomies: noise (density? texture?)/melody, East/West, songs of life/songs of death, stillness/motion, etc.

From the Eunoia Archives: The Terror Test: Test Prep #8

Originally written for The Terror Test. Check out their new website. I am now writing Lost in Arhkam. Previous Test Prep essays. 

The following was originally written for a Friday the 13th, Part VII: The New Blood (1988) and Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993) episode.

Anti-Paraskevidekatriaphobia Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mom

“We notice that in ironic comedy that the demonic world is never far away.” ~ Northrop Frye

Potential spoilers for Friday the 13th (1980) and Psycho (1960).

As a young horror fan, I liked Italian gialli, considered proto-slashers, but was rarely excited by the American slasher film franchises. I wanted to be an FX artist and was more interested in technique and thrills than characters or story. Tom Savini, one of the heroes of my youth, called these effects “gags,” like jokes in comics and cartoons. My technical interest created a distance from the material, and besides, with relatively bad writing and acting, and budgets solely meant to maximize profits, there frequently wasn’t much else to like about slasher sequels.

Working with this podcast has lead me to revisiting these movies, and surprisingly, the original Friday the 13th (1980), is one I enjoy now more than I did as a kid. Is it great? In a word, no. Is it still fun and effective? Surprisingly, this was a yes for me. Somehow this viewing brought back the feeling of watching these films as a teen. As a bonus, it was nice to see Savini’s work again after all these years and so many insufferable CGI effects later.

The music was better than I remembered, though it owes a debt to Herrmann’s score to Psycho (1960), but then again, how many horror film scores owe a debt to Psycho’s music? Henry Manfredini’s iconic “ki…ki…ki…ma…ma…ma…” still sounds creepy and still produces tension. The film has few to none of the musically cued jump scares that the sequels seemed to stack on top of one another. The cues mostly come after the action onscreen.

The film works against gender expectations like Psycho, too. With the killer’s work boots and ease of moving dead bodies, the viewer expects the killer to be a man. Plus, that was the norm in ‘80s slasher films. We find out that it is Pamela Voorhees, Jason’s mother, just as in Psycho, we find out that Mother is actually Norman. And just as Mother speaks through Norman, Jason speaks through Mrs. Voorhees, too. Besides the still creepy, “Kill her, Mommy!” I found the line “ I am, Jason. I am” interesting. In her mind she responds to Jason calling her, but that line also sounds like “I am Jason.” And, well, she is the “Jason” of the first movie. Like Norman Bates, who seems to be inhabited by his mother, it’s suggesting a possession, or obsession, as well. However a killer’s motives are explained, the slasher films and their giallo predecessors (which often explained motive through pseudo-Freudian pop-psych) are not far removed from Scooby-Doo, with one paw in the Gothic and one in the and mystery/thrillers like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.

The opening flashback sequence of Friday the 13th uses the traditional killer POV that was used in Black Christmas (1974) and Halloween (1978) among others.  What’s different in Friday the 13th is that Cunningham uses the POV style, a handheld, floating camera effect, to unsettle the viewer during the rest of the film. For example, when we see Annie, the new cook of Camp Crystal Lake, there are several moments of her walking that are filmed in POV, which leads a viewer to think the killer is watching her, but it’s broad daylight, which doesn’t feel right.  Later, once the counselors get to camp, Cunningham continues to use this technique to thwart viewer expectations, particularly in the scenes around the camp’s generator in which it feels like we are in killer POV, but we’re not. This camera effect combined with the lack of musical cues is more effective than the “scares” in the almost unwatchable Friday the 13th, Part VII, The New Blood (1988). I can say my own memory of the original has been tainted by the sequels.

For instance, not only did the amount of daylight in the film surprise me, but also the amount of  lush, green woodlands did, too. For around thirty minutes after the title sequence, the film happens in idyllic natural settings, until we get a storm and a repeat from the flashback sequence of clouds slicing the moon, similar to the setup of the infamous eyeball slicing of Un Chien Andalou (1929). Like in Shakespeare’s plays, the disturbance in the natural world goes with the disturbance in the social world. The natural setting also reminded me of the green world, an element featured in comedies of the Renaissance.

Taking the notions of special effects being “gags” and the possible connection to the green world together in Friday the 13th made me think of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, a book I had last dealt with in my undergraduate years and one I’m now eager to reread and hope to expand some of these thoughts and connections at a later date. It’s worth looking at a few of the ideas in brief.

In his third essay in the book, “Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths,” Frye analyzes the structural principles and character types of a variety of genres, including comedy. I kept noticing connections and ways of thinking about Friday the 13th. Towards the end of his discussion on comedy, particularly what he calls the phases of comedy, Frye writes:

At this point too comedy proper enters its final or sixth phase, the phase of the collapse or disintegration of the comic society. In this phase the social units of comedy become small and esoteric, or even confined to a single individual. Secret and sheltered places, forests in moonlight, secluded valleys, and happy islands become more prominent, as does the penseroso mood of romance, the love of the occult and the marvelous, the sense of individual detachment from routine existence. In this kind of comedy we have finally left the world of wit and the awakened critical intelligence for the opposite pole, an oracular solemnity which, if we surrender uncritically to it, will provide a delightful frisson. This is the world of ghost stories, thrillers, and Gothic romances. (185) 

While not part of this sixth phase, The Merchant of Venice, even with its pound of flesh, is classified as comedy. And as I mentioned earlier, slashers are not far from “the world of ghost stories” or “thrillers.”

This made sense to me in thinking about slasher films, though, considering that stage tragedy is often described as “the plays where everyone dies,” it seems counterintuitive. But slasher films just do not have the gravitas of tragedy. The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism states that “a comedy is a work in which the materials are selected and managed primarily in order to interest and amuse us: the characters and their discomfitures engage our delighted attention rather than our profound concern, we feel confident that no great disaster will occur” (25). Even if one is not a horror fan and watches one of these films, isn’t it out of some sort of amusement? And while we may be sorta concerned (I suppose we have to be for the movies to work.), are we ever profoundly concerned for our campers, dreamers, or babysitters? Whose names do we know when the movie’s over?

One of the projects I hope to continue is a filtering of the debates about whether or not slasher films are conservative or liberal through a closer analysis of Frye’s work on genre and comedy. At this point in my life, I didn’t expect to develop an interest in these movies. I thought I’d killed them off years ago. I haven’t even seen the remakes. In a way, it’s like Tina Shepard, “the new blood” of Part VII, who stares into Crystal Lake, and with her mind, brings Jason back. She was expecting to revive her father, but she got a monster. I’m still peering through the bubbles and blood to see what I will find, or maybe, what will find me.

Recent Reading Over at Lost in Arkham

A short survey of recent horror-related fiction and nonfiction is at The Terror Test.

More on The Outsiders

I’m happy to have a short essay co-written with a former student over at The Drunken Odyssey. Sometimes resolutions take a decade.

Lost Chords and Serenades Divine #14: Sweatin’ to the Goths

Or What I Think About While Doing Burpees with Peter Murphy.

You can read it at The Drunken Odyssey.