First of all, the event was SUPER indie-ster, but what would you expect? Animal Collective + "Visual Album" + ArcLight = Hipster/Indie, but I was surprised nonetheless... the hipsterism was greater than the sum of its parts...
The visual album, and that is what I am going to call it from now on, was excellent. It is part trippy visuals, part strange costumes, part Animal Collective-joyful-playtime-paint fight, all set to (for the most part) sonic joy... I won't describe the movie itself too much because its style just makes it the type of thing that you sort of have to see/listen to to appreciate and I don't want to ruin it for you by describing parts of it poorly. There is pretty much no plot, but if you expected there to be plot, then you probably expected there to be plot in Avatar (Zing.... I kid I kid there was plot, albeit recycled, in Avatar); you don't go to a film titled "ODDSAC" to see Citizen Kane, although there did seem to be an antagonist that was featured more in the latter half of the movie. I thought perhaps he was the namesake for the film due to his skin, but as I later find out the origin of the title is Gummi Bears, so it's all good... The style of the film is, as you would expect, very psychedelic, and there were sort of two main themes in it. The first was live action that would have weird visuals cut into it super rapidly that would progress into cuts that are going so fast you feel if you blink you could miss hours worth of material. The perfect word to describe the aesthetic would be kinetic. If you've seen Fight Club, which I get a feeling that most of my readers have, you'll be reminded of Tyler splicing in single frames of certain things.. you know what I mean... The other part is more artsy/effects type visuals that sort of slowly (or not so slowly) morph into new shapes. Finally, there was the music aspect of it. The way that part essentially worked was there would be sort of songs that would be perfectly in time with every cut, spliced image, what was going on on the screen etc. and then they would slowly break down into more white noise, ambient sounding stuff while some of the trippier visuals played out, and then build back up again.
So... my "analysis" of the film...
I thought it shined most when the more song like parts were playing. There was one particular moment, about halfway through the film after a long abstract visuals section, when an acoustic song started and you see a boat rowing down an extremely dark river at night that was absolutely extraordinary. Oh, and of course the movie ended with a joyous fight in which everybody was throwing paint/food around... And there was a scene in the beginning when there were large amounts of paint like ooze (my favorite credit... "Ooze Girl #1)... I'm telling you AnCo have a thing for acrylics... At those parts, I felt you were really getting the full experience, what with the bombardment of audio and visuals being juxtaposed perfectly. As the guys said afterward, the film was almost supposed to be like a final instrument, something that is not separate from the music, just another layer. Something that interested me when they said that was whether or not they thought the song parts of it should be/could be separated from the movie and listened to as their own experience, and vice versa. All their responses were different, but not drastically. Some of them (Geologist, Deakin) were more along the lines of that it was one whole experience that they think makes the best impact when you just sit down and watch and listen to the whole thing. Avey Tare on the other hand was saying more that part of the idea of it was that when you listened to them separately they created their own unique experiences, while the director, Danny Perez, was describing almost a combination of the two in his always comedic fashion, where music would all music would become a two faceted thing; you would go around doing your daily stuff and be listening to the music, and glance up and see the vampire melting and attacking the people eating marshmallows (from the movie... who knew eating marshmallows could be so creepy...), then you'd go on just listening to the audiovisual feed from NPR... It was an interesting discussion I thought that has made me think about where music is going/how it could potentially develop into something new, and also how they have sort of "transcended" (to be pretentious) the genre, what with them doing the movie and the recent art exhibition at the Guggenheim. More on that stuff in a coming post...
One more thing I was very interested in was what, if anything at all did, came first, the audio or the visuals. They were obviously made in conjunction, but I was more wondering if the music was made for the movie, or the movie was made for the music. Of course, the answer was a little bit of both. They talked about how parts of it were stuff that hadn't worked on albums but they really liked, and parts of it were them just jamming and creating the stuff that then visuals were crated for, and part of it was them scoring the visuals individually. There was more stuff talked about, but I kind of want to wrap this up. One final thing that I thought was interesting was that even though there was no plot, the movie started out with a person in this field panicking, and then it ended with everyone in that field joyous, so it was as if the characters had come full circle but changed along the way, as if there had been the three acts of a drama to change them, although of course there wasn't. Oh, and another thing (they just keep popping into my head...): the very very very first scene was this girl panicking (before she went into the field) because there was this whole in the wall that torrential amounts of ooze started coming out of, and eventually, after being unable to stop the ooze and then writing in the ooze for a while, she seems to go through the hole to where it sort of seems to me like the rest of the movie takes place... the reason I found that interesting was because, even though I don't think it was intentional and it was just me sort of making a mental connection, it reminded me of Alice in Wonderland.
Oh, when my mom talked to Avey Tare (David Portner) she of course instantly came under the impression that he is the coolest guy ever. She talked to him about synesthesia (hearing sounds triggering seeing colors), then Nabakov, then Philip Glass' Koyaanisqatsi, which I just checked out and is pretty cool and worth checking out. They were all really great guys by the way; they all seemed down to earth and just like normal guys, except for Danny Perez, who was just a hilarious, sort of out of it, completely comedic goofball guy. They were in no way describing their thing as some abstract art, it was just something that they did that was fun and they put a lot of work into, gaining a lot of inspiration from campy horror movies sugary cereals (you have to have been there to hear Danny Perez's explanation for that one...)
Be Seeing You
-- A Teenage Elephant
Also...
The Deadly Syndrome just released their sophomore album - definitely worth a listen.
After MGMT's sophomore album leaked, they put up the whole album for free to stream so we don't all have to suffer low quality. Check it here.
Vote For Jake C. here... just do it.
