Albums Compilations/Mixes 3"/7"/10"/12"/EPs
|
Four Tet: Everything Ecstatic Films & Part II So few 'video' realizations of experimental albums projects satisfy, but one needn't look far for the reasons. Deprived of the millions of dollars allocated to top-selling artists' projects, left-field figures rely on imagination to transcend minuscule budgets, only to see low-production values undermine whatever small victories they manage to achieve. But it's hardly a financial issue anyway. The real problem is the music itself which, due to its abstract nature, suffers when concretized in a singular representation and when the ineffable is literalized. Still, some artists have crafted compelling visual analogues to their music: the spectacular films shown during Kraftwerk's recent tour struck a wonderful retro-future balance, while Rechenzentrum's The Director's Cut and, of course, videos by Aphex Twin, Björk and Sigur Rós have impressed too. Unfortunately, Four Tet's Everything Ecstatic Films & Part 2 (the first disc a DVD of ten short films, the second disc thirty-five minutes of new music) won't join that distinguished company anytime soon. Yes, the DVD 'extends' last year's Everything Ecstatic but its overall mediocrity diminishes the album. Dan Wilde's trippy 'day-in-the-life' treatment of “Smile Around the Face” (the camera fixed on British actor Mark Heap's face as he suffers a bus ride injury and see-saws with a child at a playground ) is a mildly amusing diversion and Ed Holdsworth 's synchronization of water droplets and chirping birds with Kieran Hebden's music in “High Fives” impresses as the most 'professional' of the lot. But, elsewhere, stroboscopic treatments of abstract shapes (“A Joy”), animated pig butchery (“Turtle Turtle Up”), a deliriously jumping woman (“You Were There With Me”), and various other non sequiturs amount to a depressing whole. And a pink-faced Hebden slurping a Panda sucker (“Sleep, Eat Food, Have Visions”) is hardly the image I want to spring to mind when I think of Four Tet. There's nothing wrong with irreverence but there is something objectionable about Hebden being presented so ridiculously. Put simply, Everything Ecstatic is a great record…but a far from great film. And the EP? Hebden himself regards it as a 'continuation' of the earlier album, with pieces like “Turtle Turtle Up” expanded into a sixteen-minute epic. He dismantles the original, transforming it into a sprawling lab experiment (a move that recalls his similarly ambitious but considerably more cacophanous twenty-three-minute version of “As Serious As Your Life”) that's reasonably interesting if overlong. The jazzier “Sun Drums & Soil” fares well due to its tighter focus though it too threatens to come unglued in its second half. “Watching Wavelength” is a decent exercise in meditative glitch while the driving jazz-house pulse stoked in “This Is Six Minutes” definitely merits a listen. Ultimately, the EP seems a decent addendum to Everything Ecstatic even if its material doesn't match the heights of the original. But, when compared to the DVD, disc two at least comes off credibly, suggesting Hebden might have been better off issuing it alone. At the very least, the EP wouldn't have suffered the taint of its association with the DVD. March 2006
|
