Arsonfest

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Pre-review and Analysis of a New Music Video by Dylan Baillie:

Arsonfest 2013

A Grindcore Festival held August 9th and 10th in Winnipeg, Manitoba at the Windsor Hotel. 

Featuring performances by:

Flash Out

Breathe Knives

Cetascean

Shooting Spree

Detroit

Violent Gorge

Violent Restitution

Plague

Parfumerie

Psychotik Tantrum

Obacha

Ahna

Head Hits Concrete

SixBrewBantha

Define Grindcore? Simple.

Play it so goddamn fast yer heart’ll explode, blast beats thrusting the drumming front and centre, at one point all the instruments cutting out except the guitar, building the song to a cataclysmic finish, dominated by harsh vocals and extreme brevity of expression. One minute songs are not uncommon.

And a Grind Fest? Even simpler.

A publicly sanctioned evening of demon possession.

Dylan Baillie’s Arsonfest 2013 video is a nonstop barrage of music, songs flowing almost indeterminately one into another, as opposed to presenting some music, then some talking heads, then more music, more talking, etc. This is the concept of the one minute Grindcore song expanded exponentially into one hour and 22 solid minutes of sonic assault. No apologies made, before or after.

The video takes you deeper into the spirit of the music being made manifest than standing in the audience would, thereby establishing itself as a separate media experience from the Grind Fest itself. The camera angles place you looking down on the drums with the drummer, up at the finger work of the guitarists from an angle you wouldn’t witness in person, into every pained, straining muscle of the vocalist’s faces as they spit out their fury. A full vision of varying magnitudes of staccato thunder, carried directly into the crowd by the twisting bodies of the vocalists and into your living room or theatre by the video.

Broken up occasionally by the odd non-representative scene, like the long shot focussing on the band’s feet and jean clad legs as their song slowly takes shape into the usual assault.

Tattoos, hair, shirtless bodies, logo black tee shirts, flailing arms, contorted bodies, stricken facial expressions all explode from the screen, with a focus on the hands and faces. The human agencies from which the music originally bursts forth.

The video transitions seamlessly from one wall of drumming to the next. The repeating shots of drummers with tilted arrays of cymbals before them reverberate like a tornado toppling a garbage truck full of wind-chimes into a giant sewing machine.

And then there’s always the almost forgotten guitarist, lost in the drumming and singing, asserting his or her instrument for at least one passage in every song, the veins bulging out on the backs of their hands.

His or ... Her?

Yes, there are women too. Singing, playing guitar, drumming, writhing, embracing the full concept of Grindcore. The various possessed, offering a commitment to the integrity of a certain mode of expression: a relentless dream/nightmare vision of musicians in collision.

This is Abstract Expressionist music, Edward Munch’s silent painted Scream rendered aggressively aural. Especially the vocals. A hyper-assault upon the senses, driving, rampant, angry, shriek to roar with every guttural inbetween. Demon possessed headrotating music as opposed to headbanging. Like a grater scraped across your ears. Spastic to the transcendent. Vocals chastising all secure assumptions.

Grindcore, especially the vocals, reminds me of the play Play, by Samuel Beckett. An economy of titling there any good Grindcore purist would appreciate. There are three motionless characters in Play, only one speaking at a time and only when a strong spotlight is shined in his or her face. While one talks, the other two sit silently in darkness. The characters never acknowledge the existence of the other two. Beckett wrote that the spotlight provokes the character’s speech. A famous veteran actress of Beckett’s plays, Billie Whitelaw, has stated that in Play the spotlight is used as “an instrument of torture”.

I witnessed a performance of Play when I was much younger. As the characters speak in unrelated sentence fragments, punctuated by mad laughter at one point, no partial line related to the one before or after it, and the eye is continually redirected from one suddenly appearing face to another in an otherwise blackened room, the effect of viewing the play live is a physical assault on your senses, mind, and emotions; sound and light building in a unique combination of sensory noise to startle and shock, with very little recognizable coherent meaning conveyed in the process.

There are possibly five comprehensible sentences in Dylan’s entire Arsonfest video. As the linguistic signifiers of any song’s lyrics are rendered unrecognizable by their presentation, they therefore cannot be the focus of either the performance or the movie, the resulting vocal Grand Guignol acting only as garish counterpoint enhancement to the instruments’ driven roar.

Does the movie drag you into the message behind the belligerent mask obscuring the voice? As no words are used, the emotion of the vocal alone conveys meaning. A meaning discordant and shocking, exactly the effect intended. Meaning through contempt for words and prettified sound.

Shot in a nightmarish dark club, the lights change from performance to performance. Eerie green, blue, purple, and even sometimes oddly flesh toned. The eerie green especially leaving an impression of a supremely guttural Lovecraftian Cthulic Ritual made real.

Can you tell one song from another? As well as the undeniable similarity in beat and the inability to distinguish any one set of lyrics from another, there is a compelling repetition of characters through the video. Echoing visions of the mixed bands. The segments might be short, but every sequence with every separate band is a separate, complete song. Some songs are over before you’re even certain they’ve begun.

So the presentation sounds all the same. Yet the video builds. Like the guitars climbing up the walls like belligerent spiders during any given song, subtly -- as Grindcore is one of the few music genres that can render a screaming electric guitar subtle -- building the focus and intention of each song, the video layers the more defining moments of the concerts slowly forward as well, reaching an intense and recognizable finish. Still doing the same thing at the end as at the beginning, sure. But even more so, and that’s what’s so amazing.

So why does Dylan Baillie love Grindcore so much? He says the music energizes, is aggressive, fast. He likes the drumming, and the people who produce the music. Despite the apparent prevailing Satanic possession, they don’t take themselves that seriously and are tremendous to socialize with. The Canadian Grindcore scene is intense. Grabbing the emotions with a total bombardment of sound demanding attention. Plus he thinks the guitar riffs are catchy and fun.

Dylan hopes to hold a public screening of the video early in 2014, and would like to release the movie on DVD in the spring. Full production credits for the video include: Dylan Baillie, as Director, Cameraman, and Editor; Simon Peacock and Nick Miller as Cameramen.

A Grind way to spend an evening.

*******

REALITY FICTION UPDATE!

And what is Reality Fiction, you may well ask?

Simple. The concept of the Reality Television Series translated to the printed page. 40 characters from my backlog of generally unpublished material are gathered together to compete in a different theme each Episode, with one or two characters being eliminated each sequence until there are only two left to fight it out in the final. The winner gets a short novel of their own as the grand prize.

But somehow, things always seem to go horribly wrong ...

What’s happening now? Episode Fourteen. To everyone’s surprise the least likely Contestant expected chooses the theme of Flying for the next excursion. And not in a plane. Is it a dream, or just the general oddness?

Starts Friday at:  realficone.blogspot.ca

REALITY FICTION TOO! EPISODES TO DATE

EPISODE THIRTEEN:     SLAPSTICK:     “The Phantom of the Werewolf”

EPISODE TWELVE:     DAIRY FARMING:     “Early One Morning”

EPISODE ELEVEN:     BURROUGHS:     “Chapter Nine”

EPISODE TEN:     WEREWOLVES:   “The Silver Solution”

EPISODE NINE:     WRESTLING:   “Suckerslam XIV”

EPISODE EIGHT:     JANE AUSTEN ROMANCE:   “The Proud and the Senseless”

EPISODE SEVEN:     THE JAZZ AGE:   “The Bucky-Dusky-Ruby Red Hop!”

EPISODE SIX:     SUBMISSION:   “Re-Org”

EPISODE FIVE:     MASQUERADE:   “The Eyes Behind the Mask”

EPISODE FOUR:     SELF HELP:   “Sausage Stew for the Slightly Overweight Presents:

Some Several Suggestions Guaranteeing Success for the Mildly Neurotic”

EPISODE THREE:     NUDIST:   “If You Have To Ask ...”

EPISODE TWO:     FRENCH BEDROOM FARCE:   “Un Nuit a Fifi’s!”

EPISODE ONE:          STEAMPUNK:   “The Chase of the Purple Squid!”

A J.H.B. Original!