DC's

As the 21st century seemingly trudges onward on its downward path, I appreciate even more the artists who bring to life dark oneiric experiences on-screen. Here are some favorites.

 

The Hyperboreans (2024, dir. Cristóbal León/Joaquín Cociña)

The León/Cociña team needs no introduction to most readers of this blog, after their masterpiece The Wolf House (2018). Their latest feature is lighter in tone than The Wolf House, and uses a wider range of animation techniques and visual artifacts to explore aspects of Chile’s recent fraught history. Sometime DL Nate Dorr/Rock Hyrax’s review on letterboxd has his usual detailed overview and thoughtful analysis.

This has not received widespread distribution, but here are a couple streaming options.

 

 

Los Huesos/The Bones (2021, dir. Cristóbal León/Joaquín Cociña)

León and Cociña have made some terrific shorts; this is probably my favorite. Los Huesos comments on Chilean history, conjuring up a disorienting and elegiac weave of events. The elegant puppetry/animation and use of fire and simple special effects work beautifully with the scratchy soundtrack.

A couple gorgeous early shorts: Lucia and Luis.

 

 

Bestia (2021, dir. Hugo Covarrubias)

Another disturbing and thought-provoking Chilean project, that references its violent past. (BeBraveMorvern gives more context in his letterboxd review here.) The sets are obsessively detailed, and the body language of the puppets is beautifully realized. Covarrubias sustains an unbearable level of menace throughout, despite most of the horrific events being kept offstage.

Available here, and also on Kanopy.

 

 

Blood Tea and Red String (2006, dir. Christiane Cegavske)

A dream-like, sometimes absurd take on fairy-tale tropes, a paw always dipping into cruelty and violence. The expressive body language of the creatures is beautifully rendered; limbs are always at natural angles, and the hands grasp, point and gesticulate beautifully, as the conflict progresses relentlessly.

 

 

Three Fragments of a Lost Tale (2011, dir. John Frame)

Sculptor and photographer John Frame builds exquisite articulated figures and sets for operas. This is an excerpt from a longer film project, that seems sadly to have languished. Parallels with Brothers Quay of course, with the cinematic use of the camera. Frame’s puppets have highly detailed articulations with lovingly detailed hands, resulting in beautiful organic poses and motion. He also wrote the music.

 

 

Woman who Stole Fingers (2010, dir. Saori Shiroki)

I really like Shiroki’s scratchy drawing style with woodcut-like textures. The child-like narrative just slides effortlessly into nightmarish territory.

 

 

The Present (2013, dir. Joe Hsieh)

Taiwanese animator Joe Hsieh also works in a 2D hand-drawn/painted style, with more conventional storylines that develop surprising arcs and over-the-top flourishes (he is a fan of Pedro Almodovar). My favorite is The Present, with the little narrative slippages building towards the excessive culmination.

Recent interview with Hsieh here.

 

 

Night Bus (2013, dir. Joe Hsieh)

Hsieh seems to have developed a more slick look in subsequent films. Night Bus is much lighter, but still arch, gleeful, and outrageous.

Hsieh’s latest, Praying Mantis, has received a lot of buzz. It is about “a half-insect prostitute that lures johns to her home to feed to her half-insect child”. I have not been able to track down a copy yet.

 

 

Mad God (2021, dir. Phil Tippett)

Mad God probably needs little introduction here either. The visuals are absolutely spectacular, with the shifts in scale and perspective, and play with light and shadow. I had to be impressed, despite my reservations with other aspects.

 

 

Bobby Yeah (2021, dir. Robert Morgan)

Robert Morgan can also indulge in gross and outrageous gestures, though on a smaller scale. His technique and attention to detail here is impressive, with atmospheric lighting effects, the organic-looking skin tone of his characters, and the inventive ways he has with body fluids. His masterful control of pacing and comic (!) timing elevates this above an exercise in excess. There are surreal explosions of grotesque forms and transformations, with details that one might perversely interpret as “cute”.

 

 

The Cat with Hands (2001, dir. Robert Morgan)

Morgan’s much earlier The Cat with Hands is a different animal. Suggestive disturbing visuals, quirky soundtrack, pervasive quiet unease.

 

 

Stopmotion (2023, dir. Robert Morgan)

Morgan’s first feature offers a fictionalized peek behind the animator’s curtain.

More on Robert Morgan’s Vimeo site.

 

 

S He (2018, dir. Shengwei Zhou)

Finally, one of the strangest and most riveting animation features I’ve come across in ages. Set in a world where male shoes dominate and abuse female shoes, the visuals are consistently bizarre and inventive. The organic and mechanical forms are constantly twitching and evolving, and I love effective use of lighting and camera, and stellar sound design.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. This weekend the singular sound/visual artist and longtime major figure of this blog Bill Hsu has put together a personal overview of Dark Animations for us. Lots of possible revelations in there, at least if you’re not a closer follower of the genre like me. Please accept your enjoyment. And thank you so much, Bill. Such a total treat. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yep, yep, agree, agree. I tend to relegate those kinds of movies to plane flights wherein I just want tech-y distraction, but, even so, either get original and daring or don’t, you know? Right, your bro is in Hungary. Well, it must’ve been nice to celebrate another year of life in that upswinging context. Love could make so money with that invention if he needed money which I assume, being love, he doesn’t. Love giving an assassin the power of invisibility and sending him to Washington, DC, G. ** jay, Hey, hey, jay. Thanks re: the visual/sound highlights. Conlon Nancarrow … no, I don’t think I know that work. I’ll cue up the name in google and get educated. Thank you! As always, I will take your word on ‘Swann in Love’, haha. But you are almost cracking my resolve. Holiday! Where? When? Ooh, amazing. ** Adem Berbic, I saw your launch announcement on Insta. Good going. Interesting, you might have just found the key to understanding the mystery at the heart (head?) of Deleuze. Amsterdam … well, you want to stay somewhere in the center. It has sort of gentrified to the point where I don’t know exactly where’s tony and where’s as yet undiscovered by the moneyed these days. Throw out some options and I can try to piece through them knowledgeably. ** Sam F, Hi, Sam! Welcome into the machinery, maestro! Thank you for acing the blog’s lock. Nice associative notes. I’m going to double expose those with my mental notes. I wish I could set foot into your launches. Especially in Baltimore. I was there last year to show RT at a festival, and I really, really liked that city. You have the weekend of weekends. ** CS, You could do a life cast of the tree part and make an exact chocolate replica, but then what would do with that other than just predictably eat it. Hm, I see your conundrum. Drinking coffee can make almost anything interesting? ‘un siècle d’écrivains’, cool, I’ll search. Where do you live? Sorry if you already said. I am only half-coffeed at the moment. It’s never the end times. That’s my theory after living through years of various doomy situations. But then I guess that attitude makes me very vulnerable. At least you have your publisher. Big weekend of some incredible sort. ** _Black_Acrylic, Haha. ** Bill, First, thank you a ton again ‘in person’ for what’s up above! I didn’t stumble across that block, sadly. Oh, I don’t know of Ostertag’s books, actually. Huh. I’ll go hunt down what I can find of them. They sound, well, curious. Enjoy the weekend that you are kind of lording over. ** Carsten, I’ve heard those drums. Very trippy. Not as trippy as those poor dogs who are taught to try to pronounce human words, but not as deeply disturbing. Paris-wise, just as close to the center as you can get. Are you doing a hotel or AirBNB or … ? ** Steve, My faves post will launch a week from today. The last time I watched ‘Lost Highway’ I decided that if Lynch had edited out two scenes, it would be a great film. One being the pointless Marilyn Manson scene, and I can’t remember the other one. I would hesitate to call Houellebecq a French philosopher, but, otherwise, yes. ** tom, Hi, tom. I don’t give out my email here anymore after some weird stuff happened, but you can write to me on Instagram or Facebook, if that works? Sorry. I’m interested to hear. Thanks. ** HaRpEr //, Luck with Hobart, of course, and maybe even more so with the new fiction piece. I envy your fiery inspiration. Yeah, ‘SotE’ is crazy great. Amazement that you have a dad who read ‘SotE’. See what you think of ‘Afternoons of Solitude’. I think it’s about 30 minutes too long, but it’s pretty great. ** laura w, It’s a bit addictive — sound art — if I’m any indication. ‘Sinners’, yes. I thought that for a kind of horror adjacent fairly mainstream film, it was quite good. See what you think. No enlightenment here whatsoever unless the enlightenment part is a slow burn, but I doubt that. I’m not much of an Edouard Louis fan. But, boy, people sure do think highly of him. I have vague hopes that I’ll get to go through NYC in October on my way to my annual home haunt exploring festivities in LA. Hope so. ** Thom, Hi! I never joined Twitter. Seems scary. A friend told me yesterday that Threads is even worse. I’ve never looked at it. Yay, for your friend, and thanks for intersecting my stuff with him. Holobiosis is almost born, whoa! That’s exiting! July, okay. I want to get one when it’s reality. Nice. Oh, thanks so much about the instructional thing. As I’ve probably said even too many times, I feel like all think about when I write is the formal and stylistic stuff. The content is just like the furnace inside the machinery for me. I encourage you to follow through on that public sound sculpture idea, obviously. I guess it would be hard to do, but so worth it. If I was there, I’d collaborate with you on it. For better or worse. Thanks, I have an angle on the weekend, and we’ll see if it pans out. Yours seems like it could be fraught in the best way. ** Uday, It wasn’t a fun bite. To me. I think my parents thought it was hilarious. It hurt, and I thought he was a bastard. But, hey, bygones and all of that, and RIP grandpa. I would have to go see what’s on UBU, but I would assume everything housed there is pretty top notch whether I personally like it or not. What’s your weekend? ** Right. Please luxuriate in Bill’s gift until further notice, meaning at least until Monday.

 

Christian Skjødt
Ronald van der Meijs
Douglas Henderson
Nelo Akamatsu
Stephen Cornford
Rebecca Horn
Stéfan Piat
Ulrich Eller
Florian Hecker
Benoit Maubrey
Haroon Mirza
Roberto Pugliese
Aernoudt Jacobs
Kaffe Matthews
Ted Apel
Julijonas Urbonas
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller
Katarzyna Krakowiak
Cléa Coudsi & Eric Herbin

 

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Christian Skjødt Inversion (2013)
Made specifically for a WWII bunker, Regelbau Fl277, located at Furreby beach at the Danish west coast, a translation of the external (luminous) circumstances are brought into the darkness of the bunker in the form of sound. Consisting of eight autonomous systems this responsive environment examines the intensity of light using a formation of solar panels located outside on the beach. These are connected to boxes inside of the bunker, each equipped with analogue electronic circuitry and a loudspeaker presenting the solar energy as an audible and ever-changing frequency.

 

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Ronald van der Meijs Plastisphere (2019)
The stop motion image video gives a clear picture of the growth and decay of the plastic cell structure which is made by shopping bags. While this structure catches the daylight like organisms do on the surface of the ocean in order to live it. This architectonical plastic structure is slowly breathing in and out continuously which takes about 20 minutes to fill it with air and takes 20 minutes to vacuum it.

 

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Douglas Henderson Wonder Woman (2011)
Wonder Woman is a cartoon character invented in 1941 by the late William Marston (who also developed the polygraph, aka lie-detector test), and she was to be the first feminist superhero bringing ideals of “love, peace and sexual equality to a world torn by the hatred of men”. Here represented by two 12″ speaker drivers which pulse up and down, suggestively decorated with the remnants of one of Madonna’s bras. Wonder Woman was remarkable for her ability to bounce offending bullets from her bracelets, and this soundtrack layers dozens of recordings of popcorn popping in resonant pots.

 

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Nelo Akamatsu CHOZUMAKI (2017)
water, glass vessels, magnets, plastic, electronic devices, controllers.

 

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Stephen Cornford Binatone Galaxy (2011)
An installation for used cassette players which looks on their obsolescence not as an ending, but as an opportunity to reconsider their functional potential. Superseded as playback devices, they become instruments in their own right. Replacing the prerecorded content of each tape with a microphone gives us the chance to listen instead to the rhythmic and resonant properties of these once ubiquitous plastic shells. Binatone Galaxy brings the framework within which a generation purchased their favourite records to the centre of attention, revealing the acoustics of the cassette and the voices of the machines themselves.

 

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Rebecca Horn Concert for Anarchy (1990)
A grand piano is suspended upside down from the ceiling by heavy wires attached to its legs. It hangs solidly yet precariously in mid-air, out of reach of a performer, high above the gallery floor. A mechanism within the piano is timed to go off every two to three minutes, thrusting the keys out of the keyboard in a cacophonous shudder. The keys, ordinarily the point of tactile contact with the instrument, fan disarmingly out into space. At the same time, the piano’s lid falls open to reveal the instrument’s harp-like interior, the strings reverberating at random. This unexpected, violent act is followed between one and two minutes later by a retraction as the lid closes and the keys slide back into place, tunelessly creaking as they go. Over time, the piano repeats the cycle. A mounting tension to the moment of release is followed by a slow retreat to stasis as the piano closes itself up like a snail withdrawing into its shell.

 

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Stéfan Piat Rear Window (2018)
“Rear Window” by Stéfan Piat, an installation consisting of two empty rooms – one bordering the begijnhof’s garden, the other a bustling square. The windows are airtight, but thanks to microphones and loudspeakers, visitors can hear the street sounds from outside. In Piat’s work, we watch the outside world from a window that becomes a screen, like in Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window. But unlike Jimmy Stewart’s character in the film, we can actually hear what we’re seeing. We’re not only voyeurs, but also eavesdroppers, since we can discern the conversations of passers-by.

 

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Ulrich Eller Talking Drums (2008)
Forty identically constructed snare drums hang individually at face level on thin steel cords propped on circular wall positions along the architecture’s rhythmic pillars. All of the drums resonate the sound of short chalk strokes via inbuilt loudspeakers, similar to a quick writing process. The interaction results in a staccato-like, coincidental dialogue form, a “conversation” among the drums in different moods, wherein the sound backdrop permanently alters between the original sound of the recording and the typical resonating sound of the snare drum.

 

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Florian Hecker Rearranged Playlist as Auditory Stream Segregation (2009)
‘Rearranged Playlist takes outtakes of existing works I’ve been doing over the last three or four years, and these outtakes are interrupted by monotonous tone sequences that draw on Alfred Bregmans’s idea of sound streaming, Auditory Scene Analysis or better, Auditory Scene Synthesis, and the segregation and reintegration of such streams.’ — FH

 

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Benoit Maubrey The Temple (2012)
Copy of “oracle” temple ruin at Delphi constructed from 3000 recycled loudspeakers and electronics. The Temple stands outside the ZKM in Karlsruhe. Sound: “white noise” from radio receivers and people’s voices (starting March 16th 21012 by calling the German telephone number 0721 – 8100 1818 people could express themselves through the sculpture for 3 minutes).

 

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Haroon Mirza: /o/o/o/o/ (2013)
Attaching turntables and a mixer to an amplifier is a routine familiar to any budding disc jockey, but this kind of set-up process is also a preamble to any display of Haroon Mirza’s work. In other words, his assemblages and installations need to be turned on, plugged in or mic’d up. The 36-year-old Sheffield-based artist plays and creates his own records and music, often directly through his sculptures, which mismatch junk shop-bought hi-fi separates with everything from television sets and keyboards to projectors, lasers and even dry-ice machines. ‘/o/o/o/o/’, titled after the typographic notation of a musical waveform, and features five record players, a reverberation chamber and a room of surround-sound speakers.

 

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Roberto Pugliese Equilibrium Variant (2011)
In this work, the Neapolitan sound artist and composer has positioned a lever with an attached microphone in front of every loudspeaker. The seemingly natural movements of the computer-controlled levers result from an attempt to keep the feedback sound in balance. Roberto Pugliese programmed special software for this purpose. Since the sound tends to amplify itself, it is impossible to maintain it at a constant volume, so the levers stay in constant motion. The robotic units behave differently due to the different features of the loudspeakers.

 

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Aernoudt Jacobs Permafrost (2012)
Permafrost is an environmental sound sculpture about the freezing process of water. An installation has been developed in which we can observe the constantly repeated cycle of freezing and melting. By means of a custom-made sound apparatus the process is made audible. Permafrost deals with the sometimes paradoxical relation between nature and technique.

 

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Kaffe Matthews Sonic Bed (2005)
These [beds], with speakers immersed in their upholstery, create situations that transform the listening experience for the sitter into a stimulating and sensual massage, turning ‘weird’ or ‘boring’ music into something meaningful. All kinds of people would queue for hours, have very different experiences and talk of the musical as well as physical and psychological sensations they have had afterwards.

 

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Ted Apel Call and Resonance (1995 – 2015)
Five very large test tubes are used to impart strong resonances on hand made sound making circuits in each tube. Each circuit independently alternates between recording sound and playing back its recording. The sounds recorded are a combination of the sounds produced by the other tubes, the ambient sounds of the space, and the resonance of the tube. In this way, the combined soundfield is an emergent property of the five tubes, that is, each tubes sound is dependent on the contributions of the others.

 

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Julijonas Urbonas Sounding Door (2009)
Sounding Door is an interactive sound art installation designed by Lithuanian artist Julijonas Urbonas to turn any door into a unique musical instrument and a stage at once. Equipped with custom-designed electronics and software, the installation plays and composes sounds according to the door’s movements, that is, its position, speed and acceleration.

 

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Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller The Killing Machine (2007)
Partly inspired by Franz Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’ and partly by the American system of capital punishment as well as the current political situation, the piece is an ironic approach to killing and torture machines. A moving megaphone speaker encircles an electric dental chair. The chair is covered in pink fun fur with leather straps and spikes. In the installation are two robotic arms that hover and move- sometimes like a ballet, and sometimes attacking the invisible prisoner in the chair with pneumonic pistons. A disco ball turns above the mechanism reflecting an array of coloured lights while a guitar hit by a robotic wand wails and a wall of old TV’s turns on and off creating an eerie glow.

 

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Katarzyna Krakowiak Making the walls quake as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers (2012)
The sound sculpture is the amplification of the entire Polish Pavilion at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition as a listening-system. Rather than creating a new space the project takes an empirical turn, taking the existing interior in the 1:1 scale as its point of departure, with all its deficiencies and imperfections guiding the work. Architectural micro-deformations of the building’s walls and floor, the renovation of the ventilation system, and reinforcement of the resonant frequencies serve to bring this latent acoustic experience to the fore. The focus is on the secret but audible knowledge inscribed in the niches, apses, bays and vestibules, full of long-acknowledged deficiencies and forgotten paradoxes. None of the sounds in the Pavilion are alien to the building. They are all always already there, all the time. Yet, once amplified, the familiar ambient sounds become alien themselves.

 

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Cléa Coudsi & Eric Herbin Turnletters spirit (2009)
This sound installation is composed of hundreds of tiny metal letters placed on a table guided randomly by a complex machinerie of magnets. Nothing can be read yet everything is to be seen…

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! No, I don’t believe I ever met Andrea Gibson, or if I did it would’ve been brief, a hello sort of thing. I agree about that doc. PHM would’ve been better if the rock alien never learned to speak English, but then it would’ve been a giant flop. Happy birthday to your brother! Are/will you be in attendance? Love making the potato chips I’m eating 1/10th less salty, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, HB to the kiddo! Whenever it actually is. It’s healthy for kids to grow up knowing that they could be eaten by a monster, no? That book has good vibes. ** Bill, Hi. Cool about the barge concert. Kazuhisa Uchihashi does ring a bell, I’ll look him up. As ever, I hope that June concert ends up getting an audio-visual record. Do you know Bob Ostertag? I like things I’ve heard by him, usually collaborations. In fact just couple of days ago I was listening to a piece by Ibrahim Alfa Jar that he was thoroughly involved in. ** Tosh Berman, Hi! Thanks, I trust Brian peeked in and saw your and others’ glowing words. I hosted Jack Hirschman at Beyond Baroque back during my tenure. He was very warm and extroverted. And his reading managed to draw the old Venice poets people who otherwise would never set foot in the place. I hope your recovery is very on pace. ** Carsten, Hi. Thanks for thanking Brian. Everyone, Carsten adds a poetry doc to the array yesterday aka ‘The Bard of Encinitas’, a doc about Jerome Rothenberg. Here. We’re in the 19 degrees range here, which is my idea of ideal. I should be around in July at least most of the time? Still waiting to see if a possible film festival or two around then comes through. Just let me know your dates in advance when you know them. ** Alice, Hey. I’m good, thanks. I’ll see if Sorely Tunnel Adventure is google-able. Thanks. Sounds most curious. I’ve seen ‘Coney Island at Night’. Yeah, very pretty. We barely had any free time in Brussels. If it’s still up, the Lutz Bacher restropectve at a museum called Wiels is very worth seeing. I’m sure Hugo will direct you to the local high points. You take care now and through the weekend too. ** CS, Hi! I’ll look for those documentaries you mentioned. I don’t … think I know them? Thank you. What are you going to do with the white dead tree part? Prop it up somewhere for future contemplation? Nice that you’re proximate to a beach. We just have the fake beach or rather pile of sand that Paris dumps on a certain part of the Seine every summer. No dead trees for sure. Dead rats maybe. I’m happy you settled in here too! Happy day. ** Wes, Hi, Wes. Thanks very much. I feel pretty certain that Brian saw and took your words to heart. How are you? ** Charalampos, Hi from here (you know where). Me too about the producer hunt. I don’t think that part is ever smooth and easy though. Well, when you make strange little films at least. Excellent reading material there! ** jay, Thank you and a special presumed thank you from the mysterious Brian. See, if ‘Swann in Love’ was like ‘Story of the Eye’ I’d probably give up the ghost and read it. Thanks, pal. Nice weekend in the works? ** Adem Berbic, That would be quite an effect. I’d probably be beset with guest-post offers if that were the case. There were some grungy bits of Hung Kong, but not many. I had no beef with Hong Kong. It was just skyscrapers as far the eye could see, and I had hoped for more. One wants -bow to unleash an unremitting wall of noise unless that’s just me. So, good! A bit confused about what had such impact in your peripheral vision, but I suppose that’s the point. ** Steve, Ginsberg seems like the man of the hour there in NYC. I’m putting together my midyear faves list for the blog. Ah, the joys and not of culling and excising. ** HaRpEr //, I’ve never heard that joke. And now I’m trying to think of a French philosopher who looks like a Bond villain with very little success. Maybe Deleuze. Or, wait, Foucault! Enjoy your vacation from your novel. It can be very relaxing to let your brain run free, for sure. I was about to make an Elizabeth Ellen joke but I thought twice because she seems like someone who would google her own name a lot. Try Hobart, I say. That’s a marriage that sure seems like it’s in the offing. ** laura w, Wow, ‘Devil’ and ‘Lancelot’ are my Bresson #1 and #2 too. You and I need to get a coffee someday. I’m generally wary of A24 films too, but you never know, and they do seem to be maybe starting to take some chances recently? My eternal optimism speaking there. No, I need to be a hard ass about Proust. I know if I even read a paragraph, I’ll get stuck there. Like quicksand if quicksand was a real thing. Happy still early Friday on my end to you. We have the whole rest of the day to find enlightenment! ** Uday, Hey. It was Brian’s debut post, and it went so well that maybe he’ll toss the blog another one, one can only hope. That’s so sweet about your grandfather. One of my grandfathers died of a brain tumor when I was an infant so I never met him, and my other grandfather was estranged from his son/my father and I only met him a few times, and all I remember about him is that whenever I saw him he would bite my ear really hard. ** Okay. You people who’ve looked the blog for a while know that I have a fondness for art that makes noise, and today you get 19 more examples of artworks that do that. See you tomorrow.