Two Nodes on the Noise Axis: Shorts from Providence and Tampa’s Sub-Underground
Nightingale Cinema, July 20, 2017
co-programmed with Aaron Walker
The Nightingale presents a program of shorts by artists active within the orbit of the American sub-underground music and comics scene. All hail from Providence, Rhode Island or Tampa, Florida, two hubs of outré DIY culture typified by the reclamation of public or abandoned space as a site for creative expression, a lo-fi aesthetic imbued with the oozy runoff of junk science fiction and horror, and a festering occlusion from the cultural trends of our great nation’s more fashionable big cities. Rhode Island and Florida are 2/3 of what the liner notes of the 2006 noise compilation Rare Youth lovingly refers to as the “noise axis”, a triumvirate completed by California.
The films of Xander Marro/Mat Brinkman and Leif Goldberg are rapid fire assaults on the senses, filmic reflections of the exquisite, dayglo aesthetic of legendary Providence experimental living/art spaces Fort Thunder and Dirt Palace and the affiliated comics/noise/art collectives Paper Rodeo and Forcefield. The homemade videos of Carlos Gonzalez swim within the same swamp water of his maddeningly prolific music and comics output—loner Americana, fluidity between the netherworld of dreams and profane reality, and a good dose of macabre humor. Cameron Worden, an invaluable fixture of Chicago’s cinematic community as a projectionist, programmer, and, not least, maker, rounds out our evening with a dual 8mm performance of psycho-mush and mangled tape warbling.
Program: (60 minute running time)
Carlos Gonzalez: Buy This Car, VHS digital transfer, 2017 (15 minutes)
Leif Goldberg: Laws For The Interminable, 16 MM digital transfer, 2006 (3 minutes)
Carlos Gonzalez: Cafe Banana, VHS digital transfer, 2017 (15 minutes)
Xander Marro and Mat Brinkman: 0106, 16 MM, 2006 (12 minutes)
Leif Goldberg: Life Under Three Suns, 16 MM digital transfer, 2007 (3 minutes)
Cameron Worden: Prevue 8, dual 8 MM, 2017 (10 minutes)
