Like many, I first came across the name of Dredd Foole in David Keenan’s cover feature article in the August 2003 ‘Wire’ magazine about the Brattleboro Free Folk Festival. Foole’s album ‘Quest of Tense’ was cited as a major influence on artists like Matt ‘MV’ Valentine and Sunburned Hand of the Man so helped to give birth to the New Weird America scene. Continue reading
Tag Archive: Matt Valentine
Interview with David Keenan
(Volcanic Tongue, Glasgow June 8th 2007)
David Keenan is credited with introducing the genre New Weird America into the public domain. It turns out Wire editor Tony Herrington came up with the term as a way to draw together the diverse set artists David was writing about for a cover feature about the Brattleboro Free Festival.
A lot of sounds have passed our way since then but the label has stuck and is as good a way as any to identify strands experimental music that don’t slot neatly into existing headings. Continue reading
The Temptation To Zoology is a short film made in 2004 by New Weird American icons MV & EE (Matt Valentine & Erika Elder) together with Gabriel Walsh.
It offers a quirky and apparently random juxtaposition of sound and vision. Its surrealistic qualities seems tailor-made to infuriate ‘straight’ viewers accustomed to the reassurance of a structured narrative.
The psych-fuelled babble of the film’s subtitle makes it plain that lucidity is not a priority, being described unrevealingly as: “an incredible myth of things seen in the skysea concerning an animal so human and its transfiguration during a journey to the trysting place of an aeon“.
The languid voiceover near the start offers no further enlightenment. The voice refers to “reflected moonbeams” and “infinitesimal colours” in a tone strikingly reminiscent of the drawled inserts that punctuate Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band’s avant-blues-rock masterpiece -Trout Mask Replica.
The film, much like MV’s singular brand of Free-Folk, makes a positive virtue out of going with the flow and trusting instinct over intellect.
There’s an inbuilt hit and miss aspect to this approach – it easily strays into smugness and self indulgence but at the same time, if you are prepared to engage with its random design and see it as a skewed representation of freedom it begins to make more sense.
The zoology in the title I associate with the classification and characteristics of animals and finding some kinship with Nature. It is a theme analogous to the social conditioning of human beings.
Habit, as Samuel Beckett once observed, is a great deadener and when conventional choices all too often make us comfortably numb the pseudo-hippy vibe that permeates this film looks more fun than working for the man. In the words of George Clinton’s Funkadelic anthem: “Free your mind and you ass will follow”
