Monday, November 22, 2010



The ultimate hauntology artifact?

Central Office of Information films from 1970-1986 --a documentary on new towns, Illusions: A Film on Solvent Abuse, Looking At Prehistoric Sites, Peter Greenaway's Inkjet Printer, and so forth--re-edited or reduced to a brief snippet, then daubed with Mordant Music emissions, sometimes industrial and sometimes ethereal-celestial, but always oozy, gauzy, heard-as-from-afar...

From the DVD booklet, Baron Mordant explains:

The cordial gentlemen of the BFI led me blindfolded onto the roof at the BFI HQ Stephen Street and left me propped against an obsolete Steenbeck with instructions to sniff my way to the nearest nitrate room, ruMMage through the VHS mountain and not leave until I'd misinformed at least one reel of usable DVD in earnest ... in the midst of ruptured telecine transfers and squealing reels a selection of COI films, redolent to my youth, unearthed me and I duly smeared them with my detritus ... I imagined sounds & characters leaving one film & cropping up in another and that's the way it eventually spooled ... a narrative manifested itself and 'a return to the sea' would appear to be the iMMediate answer for future spores...

Incredible stuff and a major contribution to hauntology's "strong finish" (see also: Moon Wiring Club's Spare Tabby and the launch of Jon Brooks's Cafe Kaput label with Electronic Music In the Classroom) after an otherwise subdued year

Out on December 6th via BFI filmstore