New Sonic Youth record SYR-6

Received a new Sonic Youth record in the mail today: SYR 6 (Koncertas Stan Brakhage Prisiminimui).

“Koncertas Stan Brakhage Prisiminimui” (Sonic Youth)

Sonic Youth: SYR6: Koncertas Stan Brakhage Prisiminimui: Pitchfork Review
Sonic Youth's performance at the Anthology Film Archives in 2003 was intended as a commemorative tribute to Stan Brakhage, arguably the most influential filmmaker in the history of experimental cinema. Brakhage's death earlier that year was greeted with general indifference in major media outlets, and for a while SY seemed to be the only prominent outfit to even acknowledge his passing. (I learned of his death only via a press release for the tribute concert.) Four years earlier, Lee Ranaldo began the Text of Light cooperative, which is named after a 1974 Brakhage movie and regularly performs improv concerts at experimental cinema screenings. For the 2003 memorial, the full Sonic Youth troupe (and Tim Barnes of the Silver Jews) flaunted their most pretentious tendencies in front of Brakhage's short films.

I'm not entirely in agreement with the mostly dismissive review, even though I've been fairly ambivalent about most of Sonic Youth's more recent work. I also think the SYR series is much better than almost every Sonic Youth album since Washing Machine. I do like this description of the final track on SYR-6 (Heady Jam #3):

Consequently, the most successful moments are those which are nearly silent (in an improv-acoustic sort of way): bruised strings, tinny mic-stand tapping, muffled radio frequencies, zither-like electric effects, Barnes' railroad-spike percussion, Thurston Moore's wobbly tuning pegs. In fact, Sonic Youth's affinity for manual dexterity and physical texture correlates nicely with Brakhage's experiments on scratched and painted celluloid. In the final piece, a 28-minute marathon, these intimate and scarcely audible tinkerings assemble and dismantle, making way for brief prismatic stretches of methamphetic jazz guitar, spectral Western wah-wah, and static so conflagrant it literally sets off a fire alarm (twice). It's luminescent and jarring music, possibly the best ever released in the SYR series, and it evokes the spiritual metamorphosis and physical pliability that Brakhage found in film

Brakhage sounds like a model for the narrator's monastic father in Jonathan Lethem's book, Fortress of Solitude. Abraham Ebdus spends decades working on 'painted film', laboriously coloring in frame by frame, only taking time off to paint lurid covers for Sci-Fi novels in order to pay the bills.

From the Brakhage wiki:

Brakhage's films are usually silent and lack a traditional story, being more analogous to visual poetry than to prose story-telling. He often referred to them as “visual music.” His films range in length from just a few seconds to several hours, but most last between two or three minutes and one hour. Most of his work was done in 8mm or 16mm film, and he frequently hand-painted the film or scratched the image directly into the film emulsion, and sometimes used collage techniques. For Mothlight (1963), for example, he stuck moth wings, twigs, and leaves onto tape and made prints from it.

This collection looks interesting, and not only because it is a Criterion release:

“By Brakhage - Anthology - Criterion Collection” (Criterion)

Working completely outside the mainstream, Stan Brakhage has made nearly 400 films over the past half century. Challenging all taboos in his exploration of “birth, sex, death, and the search for God,” Brakhage has turned his camera on explicit lovemaking, childbirth, even actual autopsy. Many of his most famous works pursue the nature of vision itself and transcend the act of filming. Some, including the legendary Mothlight, were made without using a camera at all. Instead, Brakhage has pioneered the art of making images directly on film itself––starting with clear leader or exposed film, then drawing, painting, and scratching it by hand. Treating each frame as a miniature canvas, Brakhage can produce only a quarter- to a half-second of film a day, but his visionary style of image-making has changed everything from cartoons and television commercials to MTV music videos and the work of such mainstream moviemakers as Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, and Oliver Stone.

Criterion is proud to present 26 masterworks by Stan Brakhage in high-definition digital transfers made from newly minted film elements. For the first time on DVD, viewers will be able to look at Brakhage's meticulously crafted frames one by one.

Sounds like good meditative fodder, or unbearable tedium. Thanks to Sonic Youth for the suggestion. I'll soon find out if Brakhage is pretentious twaddle or not, once Netflix sends me the available discs.

update:

For instance, here's a Stan Brakhage short.

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