Only Connect: Yo La Tengo
April 23rd, 2002 by freddie96
Yo La Tengo
Live @ Only Connect
The Barbican, London
Saturday 20th April 2002
Over nearly fifty years, Jean Painlevé, the French cinematic pioneer and director of many a strange and beautiful film and documentary, created a series of quirky and, at times, creepy undersea documents. Many of these focused on the less photogenic inhabitants of the ocean, such as the algae-like living jellyfish Acera, which are half-snail half-slug, and octopus oozing around a muddy estuary at low tide like things from a 50′s horror B-movie.
It was for eight such short films that New Jersey trio Yo La Tengo created ‘The Sounds of Science’, a selection of equally eclectic soundtracks first performed live at the San Francisco International Film festival, and reprised here for Only Connect. With the hall in total darkness, the band became faint shadows against the large screen showing the films. The first of these, from 1929, was a black and white study of weed-living spider crabs. (There were some twee subtitles referring to the vegetation the crabs cover themselves with as ‘clothing ensembles’, while one mass of weed and crab was described as a ‘simple sports outfit’. )
Throughout all the films the subtitles continued in this manner whilst the music actually connected far more with what we were seeing, highlighting the clumsiness of spoken language in these contexts. And what music! If ever stuck in a train underground, or delayed at a gridlocked airport, this enveloping, meditative music will lower the blood pressure and distract the mind. In a sonic space somewhere between John Martyn, Four Tet, Pavement and John Cale’s drones lies these soundtracks.
Prominent sounds are those of the Farifsa organ, cymbals played for their sound colour, slo-mo funky bass lines and e-bow guitar sounds that most definitely aren’t like those of Big Country… It is only once that Yo La Tengo let rip to reveal their lo-fi trash punk roots. Appropriately it is with the one film that eschews sea creatures, instead we witness a time-lapse film of liquids becoming crystals that dates from 1978 but looks like it’s from a ‘happening’ a decade before – all strange colours and structures forming and merging.
Overall ‘The Sounds of Science’ is a delightful multiple-media trip that gains its strength from being made from audio and visual parts that are intriguing in their own right. What a pleasure that is to say in these times when too much good art is being diluted and made worse by unsympathetic attempts to modernise or multimedia it.
Gidon Z Cohen
