Scratching the Surface - A Peter Strickland Thread

ahead of tonight's radio adaptation of the stone tape strickland selects his favourite horror soundtracks and films.

Music and electronics: James Cargill
Vocal effects: Andrew Liles
Analogue effects: Steve Haywood and Raoul Brand
Sound mix: Eloise Whitmore

Written by Matthew Graham and Peter Strickland
Based on the original TV play by Nigel Kneale

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06g63fh

there's a link to a '3D sound' version down on that page which I would avoid; the best parts of this come with the abstract sound design, which doesn't fare well when rendered for binaural listening.

Score to "Duke of Burgundy" is gorgeous and evocative in a Wicker Man meets Picnic at Hanging Rock way. On par with Berberian

In Fabric was a blast, looks incredible, funniest movie I’ve seen in quite a while.

Hey Alfred, I want you to watch In Fabric and post your thoughts please!

still need to watch this. duke of burgundy and berberian sound studio are famous stuff.

He has another short film on Euro MUBI at the moment:

https://mubi.com/films/cold-meridian

Thanks for the heads up, Ward.

Flux Gourmet is great, very funny and very odd. Possibly the closest reference is Berberian... due to the concentration on sound art and a similarly floundering 'everyman' lead, but it's much further from the horror genre. A little unnerving to discover that Strickland was in a band that basically did verrry similar conceptual work to my solo project, but fuck it, nobody was going to notice my stuff anyway. I highly recommend it!

I'm still not quite sure what to think of this a day after seeing it. As emil.y says, it goes even further into the relationship between food and sound, and relating both to how you explore conceptual spaces that might otherwise be unmappable. It is also an amusing 'what if' whimsy where 'sonic catering' is an artistic space with many artistic collectives vying for bursaries, funding and attention, as well as creating a slightly satiric kink out of the modern socialised fetish seen on food programmes for capturing the sound and sizzle of cooking as something sensuous, amusingly extending that into the mundanity of the bourgeois in the supermarket via a series of mime scenarios.

That is the space the film creates and in which it operates, but the main dynamics are where and how this mixture of sensualities are digested and absorbed, and what if you are incapable of digesting them, getting acidic flux (comparable to the sonic flux which is a source of artistic and dramatic contention in the film) and flatulence. the mode of the writer and recorder is meticulously captured in a brilliant performance, again, v delicate and underdelivered, from Makis Papadimitriou. Strickland reverses the Italian group / vulnerable English in this case, to make Makis Italian, suffering social discomfort in an absurd English mixture of rigid dinner party performance (after dinner speeches are given by each of the collective, each of them excellent), and avant-garde resistance and fetishistic subliminal reaction to those social rules.

The other ruleset in this space is performance and 'backstage', where audiences show their gratification in post-performance orgies. What intimacies are available in which spaces, where do we... where are we... able to reveal ourselves, our intestinal and gustatory beings, our sexual fetish - what is the interplay in these spaces, what freedom. What role does the private performance of writing and recording have. Stones (played by Makis, and no Strickland is not frightened of the grotesque or heavy handed joke), sits, a slightly malevolent shadowy outline in the glass panelled toilet, undergoind who knows what malevolent transformation.

The sound, as you might expect, is extraordinary, spacious, dense, discrete - the writer and recorder's flatulence is barely registered, the speech of the actors is beautifully captured - that speech in itself nuanced, from Asa Butterfield's slightly dreary and shy wealthy dropout London, to Gwendoline Christie's poised, over-rich, and melodramatic depth, and ofc Fatma Mohamed's crisp, autocratic, ironic voice (god, she and her voice are beautiful). Birdsong and field recordings fill the night and the 'thinking walks' the collective go on. The sonic performance and malevolent background miasma of recorded food is also exhilarating and appropriately vicsceral. So yes, the sonic space is, as ever, as rich as the pictorial, dramatic and scripted matter.

^^^ emil.y and Fizzles OTM. It's the funniest film I've seen in quite a while. Flux reminded me a lot of Peter Greenaway; I've only seen this one and Berberian among Strickland's films, so I don't know if the comparison goes further back.