FiumeNights

A few hours before the show, in front of the Poisson Rouge, the new West Village venue where Tinariwen would perform on that night, a new yorker dressed as a tuareg asked a tuareg dressed as a new yorker an autograph. This world is sometimes a funny chaos.
Tinariwen is one of my favourite bands, by far the most incredible sound to come from Africa in this 21st century - hard to imagine how they have been able to come up with such a unique sound, and many of the most interesting brooklyn bands of the day were in the room to try to understand. In the end everybody was dancing and it was just perfect.
The first time i have seen Tinariwen play was at 3am, in the middle of the desert in Mali, at the Festival au Desert, 2 hours away from Timbuktu, and it was an incredible experience. Even when they were not playing live, their music was played in each city we visited, always this same melody catching our ears. My friend Wills from Greenowl offered me the possibility of filming them before the show, and this little video we share today (plus this other one) is the very simple result of a long deal to convince them to play an acoustic song - in the end, only the main singer Ibrahim joined us. Nothing incredible here, total impro style in backstage a few minutes before the show, but a beautiful sound i wanted you to hear. Plus this other short video during their live performance (and, no, they don’t dress like that in the streets of NY).
Last note, they are featured in the movie Footsteps in Africa, a nomadic journey. I haven’t seen the film yet, let’s just hope it will be better than the shitty trailer they have.

Philippe Grandrieux
When in Paris as today, i try to spend time to watch movies that you wouldn’t see anywhere else - one of the last pleasures of old Paris. This morning i went to see Un Lac, the 3rd movie by french filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux. Sombre (1999), his first movie, or maybe more the blurred souvenir of it, was a big influence on my work when i switched from photography to moving images. Un Lac is probably even more experimental than Sombre was, a very unique experience in cinema nowadays, which i think difficult to link to any other film released those days - a very strong aesthetic experience, probably one of the most striking movies i have ever seen from a visual point of view. Grandrieux is his own camera operator, and that is definitely the main element which explodes the viewer’s marks at first - almost the whole movie is shot in close ups, extremely close to the bodies, the eyes, the skins. You will never see a horse filmed like that for sure. Even if some might think that Grandrieux’s cinema lose himself a bit too much in the formal experience, there’s is something there absolutely unique to this art form, a sensorial aspect to it which brings back in mind the cinema of Tscherkassky or even Brakhage.
One of the strongest aspects in ‘Un Lac’ is the way images works with sounds - the sounds are only diegetic (even if very reworked and raffined), which allows the images to be that free. An experience we often get while shooting live music - a perfect sound allows the images to try something else, to go somewhere else and towards abstraction, while the contrary doesn’t work much. Funny also to notice he’s been asked to direct a music video for Marylin Manson (who’s a huge fan of his ultra-stylised and difficult 2nd movie, La Vie Nouvelle).
‘Cinema is profundly documentary at first’ says Grandrieux. I can just agree with this fantastic image creator, without even taking more time to explore the whole ‘out of frame’ dimension in his movies, allowing viewers to reconstruct an intense psychic landscape. I wish i could get some of his movies to share, but they are still pretty hard to find - and it’s quite definitely a big screen experience anyway. To me, the perfect companion on a bigger screen to one of my favourite movies for the small screen, ‘Pain Is’ by Stephen Dwoskin.

Very short post today - try to find the link between Tinariwen and Grandrieux, mmm… In between two projects now, going to ATP for the weekend, coming back on tuesday with the best Take Away Show we have ever done, finally online: Patrick Watson. Yalla.