Tomaga perform live score LUCIFER RISING / EARLY ABSTRACTIONS

Here’s the next item of this year’s programme: Combining industrial, jazz, psychedelia and minimalism, Tomaga (UK) from the Hands in the Dark will add two new scores to LUCIFER RISING by Kenneth Anger and EARLY  ABSTRACTIONS by Harry Smith. Plus, you’ll get the chance to see another early subversive work of film: Maya Deren’s and Alexander Hammid’s classic MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON—on glorious 16mm!


LUCIFER RISING

USA/UK 1970-80 D: Kenneth Anger, A: Kenneth Anger, Marianne Faithful, Bobby Beausoleil, 28’, 16mm / USA 1939-56 D: 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.


supporting film: MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON

USA 1943 D: Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid, A: 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.

Tickets: 10,00€ + fee • available at Culton Ticket (Peterssteinweg 9) and online via TixforGigs.