Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Kevin at PLM comes up with the goods again, posting...well....the soundtrack to Suspiria as re-imagined by err.. some bloke.. plus the guy who used to produce New Kingdom (and put out his own stuff on Wordsound/plus Macro Dub Infection bizness) Scotty Harding. It was used as part of an installation by Stan Douglas, and I quote...

"One could say that Douglas's overall project involves modernism's promise and the nostalgia that results from its failure. With Suspiria the artist turns explicitly to a few historical moments of utopian aspiration. Referring to both Das Kapital (in which Marx repeatedly nods to a fairy-tale idiom of drama and transformation) and The Communist Manifesto (which famously opens with the "specter of communism" hanging over Europe), Douglas mines the Grimms' stories for economic and social allegory. The characters here--the innkeeper, the giant, the poor traveler, the long-suffering servant--act out cryptic vignettes centering on payment and debt while being confronted by alternately nightmarish or ecstatic visions. Each scene inexorably replaces the previous one in a roundelay that itself brings up ideas of exchange and entrapment. Douglas's ghosts are shadows of a future that never came to pass: the economic and social redemption promised by modernism; the end to alienation foretold by communism. The "ghosts" also point to the obsolescence of a medium, in this case Technicolor (Argento's Suspiria was one of the last films made in the West using this process)."
So, it's a 2002 (!) Hauntology reworking of one of the hippest Italo-prog film soundtracks by one of Hip-Hop's most underground artistes.... so this Douglas chap is clearly doing some interesting stuff, plus his wikkipedia page says he's spent the last few years exploring Beckett!

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