Reviews

BOX #39 - 26 September 2004 - Dada-Meinhof & Danni Zuvela - Hetleveiker - Joel Stern & Sally Golding

Review by Jamie Hume

First up this time around was Hetleveiker who is in reality Paul Forbes-Mitchell who since last year has been involved in a cultural exchange with Chinese noise artists like Ronez(Zhou Pei). Adopting a magpie approach he takes a banjo, mixer feedback, a contact mic and field recordings and proceeds to throw them into a sonic pot which bubbles over blowing the lid off, spilling all over the ground. The satisfying racket was like being privy to the tortured mental processes of a post-WW II computer as it tumbles headlong to a complete nervous breakdown. Call it an exercise in audio voyeurism.

And then for something completely different.

Up next was Dada-Meinhof, who prior to the departure of guitarist Mark Skelton(also ex-Perfect Lovers), were Cuban Car Parts, although they did one show with this name post-MS with a cellist named Vanessa in collab with The Slippery Roger. This, their fourth show, was their second performance with filmmaker Danni Zuvela after OtherFilmFestival in August. Proceedings were kicked off with Dave using a home made device and various fuzz pedals to create a sound like a planet being torn from its orbit. Meanwhile to mourn the 30th anniversary of John Howards's election to parliament various manipulated images of Bush Jr's glove puppet while Graeme maintained a beat that would have made Moe Tucker seem like John Bonham. Changing over to bass, while Graeme started to whack a bicycle wheel with Danni using an OHP, a text sheet, scissors, red cellophane and water to complement Kimball's & Cakebread's Deen Brothers approach to rock. The glorious cacophony was concluded after 15 minutes with Dave throwing his bass into the kit accidentally striking Graeme in the side of the head leaving a trickle of blood from above the ear.

Next up was Joel Stern & Sally Golding. Joel Stern, general globetrotter originally from Melbourne now resident in Brisbane has been involved in Low Resistance Group with Anthony Guerra & Paul Hood, as well as various other collab and solo projects. Sally Golding, his partner, filmmaker & projectionist has worked with him on numerous occasions. Looping some film over an exposed pipe in the screening room into one projector facing north with another one facing east we were conducted to a fractured barrage of images which Carlos Castenada would have had difficulty imagining. Joel with a laptop, contact mics, loose leads and a mixing desk took you to the desert where you could hear the movement of every grain of sand, the rubbing together of an insects legs, and distant voices torn apart by the wind into something else.

Who needs peyote? Twenty four hours in twenty minutes has never sounded so good.