Dark Room Filled With Light

Images by Yasunori Ikunishi, Yasunori Kakegawa and Tetsuya Nagato
Music by Filament (Sachiko M and Otomo Yoshihide)
Released by Uplink

This year, for the first time, I find myself buying DVD's of abstract music paired with video art. I'm sure there have been earlier releases I've missed, or passed by due to a lack of interest, but now this format seems to taking off among the musicians that have captivated my interest of late. It is a natural pairing and is representative to how this music is often presented live. A lot of this music is made by people sitting near motionless at tables discretely adjusting a few parameters or crouched behind laptops with only their faces lit in its unnatural glow. From the beginning of laptop music, there was a concern for the visual element, which was addressed by coupling the live performance with film, video projection or other such visual displays. It also provided an opportunity to collaborate with visual artists to develop music in response to the images and perhaps subvert the notion of sound serving the images that film traditionally demands. These new video releases are something that one would have expected - if the music is informed by the images and vice versa then only a video release has a chance of being genuinely representative; anything else would be akin to an audio release with only half of the recorded tracks released. This certainly was the case for AVVA, a DVD from Toshimaru Nakamura and Billy Roisz, released on erstwhile earlier this fall, which is a true collaboration in that the video is directly informed by the music (though how much the music is informed by the video is hard to say). Another common event was the live soundtrack with a film projected and the musicians reacting to or playing a structured or semi-structured score along with it. While not as intimately coupled as the previous case, the results are still better served with both video and audio in a single package.

Based on what little I can find on the web in English it appears that for Dark Room Filled with Light there was a live performance of Filament with the video being broadcast simultaneously. How many times this was presented as a "live installation", so to speak, or in practice before hand is unknown but interestingly the DVD includes two separate "soundtracks" to the film. The film is sixty minutes long, so the DVD contains one hundred and twenty minutes of Filament that is as good as anything I've heard from them. Their performance for this film are in keeping with the most recent Filament performances documented on the Filament BOX set but if anything even more spare. When you compare the two soundtracks, it seems clear that they are often choosing to make similar gestures at similar times. In the DVD format, this is difficult to compare directly but I was able to check several events. For example, Sachiko utilizes two long continuous tones during the course of the hour, the first of which begins at approximately 12 minutes on the first soundtrack and the second at 11:30. More importantly, these both occur after a distinct visual element on the video. Otomo's contributions are more difficult to judge in this way, but in each soundtrack, he mostly seems to be generating sounds by manipulating the needle of a turntable directly or with objects. However, on each soundtrack there are a number of segments that clearly utilize the movement of the turntable. I can't say that these occur as closely as I was with the Sachiko tones but they do occur at a similar amount of time through the piece. I dwell on this as I think that they approached this as a soundtrack performed live and had a set of responses that they would assign to various visual events in the film. I would say that they were fairly loose as with Sachiko's tones - play these after a pause from this event in the film. The variety of sounds that they use does make each soundtrack unique, it certainly is not as if they are following a score, rather the film is their guide and some events lead to similar responses.

As for the music itself, it is wonderful - spare, working with a discrete yet varied set of sound events and not easily falling into routine. The essential nature is pointillistic, events in time but with varied durations that can stretch to many minutes as with those two tones mentioned above, to an appreciable duration such as with the loping scrapes from Otomo's revolving turntables or as short as a tap on a cartridge needle or the time to turn on and off a tone generator. Sachiko works both with the short twittery sounds as well as with longer tones. At several points, she layers both of these together and at least once plays an extended higher tone over a very low, near subsonic tone. Otomo in general also works with micro-events, often directly manipulating his turntables needles. Clicks, pops, rubbing sounds, the occasional static burst and every so often a gentle pattern of the needle being brushed by the rotation of the turntable. The pattern of the music is that it begins very sparsely, long seconds between very short events and becomes denser over time. The sonic range is fairly constant throughout and it truly is the length of the sounds and their overlapping that creates periods of greater or lesser density and volume. There are a few events that are louder by comparison to the rest of the sounds and one example of this from the second soundtrack occurs about half way through with these sharp, gritty bursts of static that pan across the stereo sound field. The first soundtrack especially has several points that create a very physical sensation that I know from experiments of my own are due to ultrasonic sine waves. Corresponding to these ultrasonic events are subsonic or near subsonic sounds that when used may give the impression of near silence. Like the ultrasonic tones, this is music to felt though more in the body then in the head. These in conjunction with the events on the screen make for a very intense, visceral response, much more so then I think that one would expect from familiarity with this material.

This brings me to the images and the video, which of course is the essential nature of a DVD release. I mentioned the music separately above as it is representative of Filament that I would happily purchase. Prior to the titles, there is a screen of Japanese with one English word - warning. Is this a copyright warning or is it a health warning? A rather suspect the latter as the film begins with a pure white screen that after few minute seems to be flashing at you. I could see this being dangerous to those with epileptic tendencies, so if susceptible I would heed this warning. This effect is used throughout the film in conjunction with various images of varying degrees of definition. I found this aspect of the video to be a fundamental component of the DVD's power and I strongly recommend watching in near total darkness with only the TV illuminating your room for maximal effect. The flashing white light is like staring into a strobe light with ones eyes closed, which anyone who has done this knows creates patterns, afterimages and visual illusions. Not being as intense one is able to watch this eyes open but this caused very dramatic physical reactions. I felt at times as if I was in a pre-epileptic state, on the verge of convulsions - or at least so I imagine, not having experienced a seizure before. In conjunction with the ultra-sonic tones mentioned above the sensations caused by this experience were nearly overwhelming at times. I don't think that I have ever had such a reaction to hearing or seeing any music before and this alone makes for a powerful combination. The images that are utilized along with the white light are varied but tend to be abstract geometrics or very sparse textures. After an initial ten minutes of gently strobing white light there is a series of geometrics that seem to move toward the viewer and are cross-faded rapidly with other images. This lasts maybe a minute or two and was the least compelling aspect of the film to me. After this, the images are less defined, fading out from the background white, blurring with it and then fading out again. Broken lines here and there, a far distant tree line, one bit of text and many washed out layers of tans and browns.

Returning to the idea of collaborations of imagery and music is Dark Room Filled with Light a collaboration or is it a film with a soundtrack? It does seem to be the case that the film was created first and that Filament worked with the video provided to create the music for it. Clearly, it is not like AVVA with the video being setup to change along with aspects of the sounds. There is a third option that Filament merely played in a room where this film was being projected and any synchronicity between the two is the result of apophenia. As a connoisseur of television static, I know that our mind frantically makes patterns and associations out of any simultaneous stimuli. Try this sometime if you haven't before, tune your television to a dead channel, put on some music, and sit in the dark watching it. Ghostly patterns will soon emerge and seem to tie directly to the music. Our brains are pattern recognition machines and in this capacity, one is always going to find associations between video and music. But in the case of Dark Room Filled with Light I think that Filament chose to work with the film, scoring it as it were but still making Filament music. They do not choose to make a sound just because something blips on screen, far from it, as there are plenty of short dashes, dots and flashes that could easily be reacted to via their more pointillistic gestures. They work with texture and feeling and while they clearly structured each to the pacing of the film, it merely demonstrates that they were working with the film, inspired by its flow but not simply reacting to it. This aspect makes this an incredibly successful collaboration coupled with music that is constantly engaging, challenging and pure. Perhaps I'm in a mind set these days where this more spacious and generous music is highly appealing but these aspects make this DVD as one of the best things I've experienced this year.

While a Japanese import the DVD appears to be all region and thus playable on any player. Available from ErstDist, Esquilo, Amazon Japan and others.

~ Robert j. Kirkpatrick