Today | Tomaga live score LUCIFER RISING / Meshes of the Afternoon
Prepare yourself for the trip!
Valentina Magaletti (Raime, UUUU, Shit&Shine) and Tom Relleen (The Osciallation) aka. the psych-dub duo TOMAGA will hit the stage at UT Connewitz tonight, 9pm, to perform their live score to Kenneth Anger’s occult classic LUCIFER RISING – and, especially for GEGENkino 2018, they also developed a score to the EARLY ABSTRACTIONS of Anger’s fellow abstractionist filmmaker Harry Smith, which they will lay down tonight as well! Moreover, the evening will be opened by the maze-like MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid.
All films tonight will be shown on glorious 16mm! (Thanks to Arsenal for the copies and thanks already to tonight’s projectionist Dennis Vetter.)
| Wed 11 April 2018 UT Connewitz | LIVE SCORE |
| 9 PM | opening film MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (USA 1943) D: Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid 14’ |
| TOMAGA (UK) add live scores to: LUCIFER RISING (USA/UK 1970-80) D: Kenneth Anger 28’ & EARLY ABSTRACTIONS (USA 1939-56) D: Harry Smith 23’ |
Tomaga (UK) live score LUCIFER RISING & EARLY ABSTRACTIONS
USA/UK 1970-80 R: Kenneth Anger, 28’, 16mm
D: Kenneth Anger, Marianne Faithful, Bobby Beausoleil
USA 1939-56 R: Harry Smith, 23’, 16mm
Being subversive high priests of New Age Cinema and ardent worshippers of occultist and self-appointed Antichrist Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Anger and Harry Smith take into account esotericism, archaic symbols and hardly decodable mythologies each with their own aesthetics. Topically, Anger refers to the charismatic figure of Lucifer, the most incandescent angel in heaven, who is banned after engineering a revolt against God and henceforth develops into a rebel against established orders. In images of creation and destruction, of deities and forces of nature, Anger interweaves Christian myth and historical, pop-cultural and personal threads. In Smith’s partly hand-painted animations, colours and forms are mushrooming seemingly erratic: grainy, coarse textures and micro-organisms on the one hand, design elements seeming modernist and bits of short narratives on the other. With bass, synthesizers (Tom Relleen) and percussion (Valentina Magaletti), Tomaga will add live scores to these classics of experimental cinema. The London duo canalises multi-instrumentalisms in lose patterns traversing industrial music, psychedelia, jazz and minimalsim. Committed to musical exploration, they dismantle known tropes in favour of new configuration, create tension between improvistaion and form, The result is sometimes modest noise music, seomtimes manically danceable.
Pre Film
MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON
USA 1943 R: Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid, D: Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid, 14’, 16mm
Proceeding from actual things, MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON moves towards an implausible universe step by step. First, the hand of the protagonist places a flower, then the film disappears together with her to a distorted dream world, in which lookalikes meet, hooded figures glance out od mirrors and order falls apart. Time moves forward and backwards, leaves blanks, accelerates. In the end, a knife flashes, a mirror brakes and waves wash away the shards into the Atlantic.
