Legendary UK avant-garde musician, film-maker and artist, Mike Cooper, returns to the Far North with a classic silent film and live film score.
Cooper, a resident of Rome and regular visitor to Cairns, will be presenting a live soundtrack to the Russian film “Man With A Movie Camera”, shot in 1929.
Dziga Vertov’s “Man With A Movie Camera” is considered one of the most innovative and influential films of the silent era.
Startlingly modern, this film utilises a groundbreaking style of rapid editing and incorporates innumerable other cinematic effects to create a work of amazing power and energy.
Film pioneer Dziga Vertov uses all the cinematic techniques available at the time – dissolves, split screen, slow motion and freeze frames.
For the past 40 years Mike Cooper has traced a path completely his own as an international musical explorer.
His first band, The Blues Committee, played with and supported blues legends such John Lee Hooker, Howlin Wolf and Jimmy Reed in the 1960’s.
While his 1969 album, “Oh Really?”, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, Cooper is always traversing new ground, and consistently re-inventing himself and his music. He was recently invited to perform and collaborate inside Xavier Veilhan’s Studio Venezia project for the French Pavilion, at the Venice Biennale in 2017.
With his roots lying in acoustic country blues he has, arguably, stretched the possibilities of the guitar by pursuing it into the more avant-garde musical areas with an eclectic mix of the many styles he has practiced over the years.
Ranging freely through traditional country blues, folk, original songs, free improvisation, pop songs, exotica, electronic music, electro-acoustic music, and ‘sonic gestural’ playing utilising open tunings and extended techniques.
His favoured instrument is a vintage 1930’s National tri-cone resophonic guitar played acoustically and/or ‘treated’ through a series of digital sampling and looping devices and his voice.
“The pulsating excitement, the sense of almost infinite social and artistic possibilities that was unleashed by the Russian Revolution, reached its cinematic climax in Man With A Movie Camera, a film made just as the dead weight of Stalinist orthodoxy was about to crush down on the whole avant garde movement…”
Screen Culture Club & The 5Five presents:
“Man With A Movie Camera” (1929) with live score by Mike Cooper (UK).
Fri 6th April – Doors 7.00pm, Show 8.00pm
Screen Culture Club, 14 Florence St, Cairns
– Tix $20 – trybooking.com/366123
© Copyright 2024 | NQ Music Press