Rooftop Films: We Don't Care About Music Anyway July 16, 2010

VENUE
OLD AMERICAN CAN FACTORY
The Roof of the Old American Can Factory
GOWANUS
232 3RD STREET, BROOKLYN, NY 11215
Take the R to Union or the F or G to Caroll St/.
8:00 Doors Open
8:30 Live music
9:00 Films begin
11:00 Reception in courtyard

NY Premiere! In this stunning and engaging documentary about the avant-garde music scene in Japan, everyday objects are transformed into musical instruments and radical noise art is grounded in a poetic reality.

Film Preceded by:

LOOP LOOP (Patrick Bergeron | Canada | 5:00)
Images out a moving train in China form a complex visual poetry.

Presented in partnership with: IFC, New York magazine, vitaminwater, Issue Project Room & XO Projects
THE FILMS

WE DON'T CARE ABOUT MUSIC ANYWAY (Cedric Dupire & Gaspard Kuentz | France & Japan | 80 min.)
To compose is to remember things that have entered us. Memories travel through our minds and bodies. When you hear a sound of any nature, I think that you remember it more than you hear it. When you recall more than one thing at a time, something new is created.
- Sakamoto Hiromichi (the cellist)

We Don't Care About Music Anyway follows a group of eight avant-garde Japanese musicians as they watch, discuss, and - mostly - create sound. Their work is technology - that is, they use technology to seamless create their music, fight it, resist it, restrain it, beat it, play with it, creating music that ranges from hardcore to dissonant to tender. While technology and its waste are critical to their practice, they utilize more "organic" instruments as well, including vocals, cello, and, most surprisingly, the human heartbeat.

Lights and a contact mic are connected to Yamakawa Fuyuki's heartbeat. He does breathing exercises to alter his heart's tempo - so it is, as he says, both controlled and automatic. It is incredibly suspenseful and tense to watch this. In a different scene, Fuyuki tapes a contact mic to the bridge of his nose, pounds his head - percussion. He flips his long hair around and this creates a new sound set. Now he is curled on the floor, steam rising from his body. In another scene, a man composes electronic sounds on a beach covered in trash, a seeming wasteland, grey ocean to the left, wind turbines to the right, and, right in front of us - camera, viewer - a woman wails on her guitar, dancing furiously in a silver bodysuit. Which she proceeds to take off, while still playing.

The cinematography, in turn, unfolds lyrically, setting the familiar Tokyo of bright lights and crowds against the detritus of all this - the wasteland that accompanies any consumerist society. The incredible waste. The camera drifts, and we follow it, mesmerized, the landscapes almost soundscapes unto themselves, with surprising "notes" and changes in texture and speed. What we see is not a post-apocalyptic landscape, but what is all around us, in the liminal space, at the edges of our cities and societies. The landfills and dumps that fill and grow, accommodating our "innovation" in tiny pieces of plastic. The exterior landscape - from city to landfill - is continuously being destroyed and remade. The world outside goes on and on.

Ultimately, though, the film is about sound; everything in it comes down to this. The music is ritual, release and agony. It is constantly building, sawing, pulsing. Sometimes it is hard to take. Sometimes it is cathartic.

This film is co-presented with Issue Project Room as part of Rooftop Films and XO Projects, INDUSTRIANCE Series: films, discussions, installations and more about the changing landscape in industry, architecture, agriculture, labor, and related fields. Issue Project Room is a vital meeting place for the most disparate forms of creativity whose sole criteria embodies the integrity and spirit of artistic expression and exploration.

- Sarah Palmer

Official Website: http://www.rooftopfilms.com/2010/schedule/25-we-dont-care-about-music-anyway