Son[i]a #284
Luke Fowler
Following an intuitive methodology based on an autodidactic approach, Luke Fowler (b. Glasgow, 1978) has created a body of film works that disrupts documentary narrative conventions. His films make up a gallery of episodes and characters that connect diaphanous experiences, the opposite of “a fait accompli”. In them, time tends to expand, voices multiply, old 16mm reels merge with new footage, and a plurality of discordant testimonies are brought together around a single event, so that readings are free to move in ambivalent directions.
Luke draws attention to the existence of a gigantic mosaic of individuals who played an important role in history at a particular time and then vanished. Heroic figures never emerge on their own, Fowler reminds us: they are sustained by a dense network of affects and interactions that are then wiped from recorded history, creating an ideological problem of focus between figure and ground. His close collaborations with sound artists including Lee Paterson, Mark Fell, Toshiya Tsunoda, and Eric La Casa revolve around the same ideas, consolidating a demythologising filmmaking approach in which the authorial form is diluted, remixed, and opens up to its potentialities.
In this podcast, Luke Fowler talks about music, computers, and instruments, about infrasound, ultrasound, and thresholds of the listenable, about archives and obsessions, about affect as a film editing criteria, and about the enormous complexity involved in representing a person’s life. We also talk about the forces that make some artists disappear from the cultural canon altogether in spite of having created fascinating, ground-breaking work.
All music by Luke Fowler and Fowler/Youngs
Mark Fell and Joe Gilmore
Sound artists and curators Mark Fell and Joe Gilmore talk about minimalism, complexity, abstraction and the processes and concepts behind their audiovisual works.
Malcolm Le Grice
Malcolm Le Grice talks about his 1970 work "Berlin Horse", which is part of the MACBA Collection and moves on to expanded cinema, materialist structuralism, latency, suspense, and the representation of time in his work.
Mark Fisher
The cultural impact of Mark Fisher's work continues to grow years after his death in 2017. His tough but always accessible dissection of the system and its endemic problems was captured in essays, posts, and books, such as Capitalist Realism, which gave rise to this conversation. The book explores the dangerous connection between neoliberalism and mental health, almost as a tragic portent of his death, although it is much more than that. In the podcast, Fisher talks about the avalanche of repercussions of the 2008 financial crash, particularly in relation to the idea of capitalism as the only possible framework.
Once Upon a Time in CA
A spaghetti western about experimental music on the West Coast in the 1980s.