Aphera Music

Last time I was home we set up an old WWII-era projector to watch the 16mm reel of a film my mother made during her days in film school. Due to having misplaced the reels for quite a while and a lack of necessary equipment and perhaps chagrin from quitting her profession in film production, she hadn’t watched her films in 21 years. Thus, it was our first time seeing her hidden artistry.

It was also my first experience with the kind of equipment it took to play a film made in the late seventies.  It took nearly an hour for my dad to set up the reel – first it was backwards, then it started going in reverse. We didn’t attempt to pair the audio with the video because it was distributed over four different reels that were meant to be perfectly synced with each other and with the film but we didn’t even have one tape player! Yikes, how did anyone do anything back then?

Anyway, we got the movie playing and black and white images flashed onto the suspended projection screen before us. The movie was about a personal apocalypse and as the character spiraled downward the rate of the cuts increased and scenes whirred in front of our eyes to create an effect of tension. Cuts are edits where the film has been manually cut and taped back together so as the movie climaxed it began to jump off the track because the tape used to hold the cuts together was old and stiff and deteriorating. I guess one of the tricks to help guide the film is for someone to guide the film with his or her finger as it’s passing through the projector. This was George’s job; every time the film jumped and started to get out of sync the image would move around on the screen until George corrected the movement of the film and it returned to normal. It was just as stressful to watch George holding the film steady as it was to watch the main character’s eventual identity apocalypse. Finally, at one point, as George was struggling, the film tore completely (not to worry, this was remedied with fresh editing tape).

The reason I described this is because LCD’s song, “All I want,” has the same effect. It begins with a steady drum beat, then the guitar comes in with a slow melody while underneath there is a quicker keyboard meandering.  Finally, layered on top is the complementary vocal melody followed later by a completely independent synth. As the song progresses these components begin to fall apart like different parts of a machine; or one melody seems to get off track kind of like the film and then it would resume its normal pattern as if someone was holding it back from skipping completely. Just as you think the song is going to ‘rip’ it jumps right back onto its track. At the end, there is no taming every component and as James Murphy sings “take me home” the machine has completely broken and even the steady, simple drum beat is gone.

The incredible thing about this album is that every song on the album was constructed as meticulously as “All I want,” yet somehow it manages to sound like an effortless disarray of sounds. I imagine that each piece is a taming of wild noises. It’s like Murphy is conducting an out of control orchestra and somehow produces a symphony. For those of you who have seen Howl’s Moving Castle, think of Howl’s castle and how every disjoint component seems like it’s going to collapse or roll away, yet each gear, leg and door contributes to how the entire castle can gracefully move.

P.S. the lyrics in the title of this post are from the song, “Drunk Girls”. Great song with spot on lyrics.

Tags: LCD Soundsystem

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 at 12:12 PM and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.