8PM

SUBLIME FREQUENCIES:

For 15 years now, the cadre of film-makers, sound-gatherers, and image-gleaners of known as Sublime Frequencies have been seeking out the unheard and obscure in remote locales – finding and championing previously undocumented ethnic folk musics, as well as more contemporary hybrid forms. As a record label and publishing concern, they inspired the ever-growing movement of reissue and “outnernational” record culture, and have continued to be at it’s vanguard and intensely prolific – continually releasing new musics from contemporary guitar groups found deep in the Sahara and single-string players in the far reaches of Laos alike. They’ve also reissued dug and strange pop music from a constellation of non-aligned zones and times:  the streets of India, the cassette racks of Indonesia, radio transmissions of North Korea and the Levant, and the vinyl culture of 1970s Iraq.  Core to the project has also been their radically subjective documentaries – highly creative, impressionistic travelogues that shed the pomp of academic ethnography in favor of more direct methods – discovering and rendering marginal music cultures in their own unique style of hypercolor vérité.


Palace of the Winds
A film by Hisham Mayet
2009, 50 min

An intimate and dreamlike journey exploring the culture and music of the Saharawis from the Western Sahara and Mauritania. This film explores the rich heritage of a culture that is cloaked in mystery and mired in struggle.  With spectacular images from inhospitable landscapes, chimerical phenomena that transpire by the sheer remoteness of the land, and haunting indigenous music from a people that have long been shrouded in mystery, this is a genre-defying film of profound beauty that explores this obscure region through its most  legendary musicians, including Group Doueh and Group Bab Sahara.


This World Is Unreal Like A Snake In A Rope
A film by Robert Millis
2011, 60 min

A journey through the ancient Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu featuring Hindu trance ceremonies, street music, festivals, nagaswaram improvisations, loud cities, ancient temples, processions, devotions, decay, fireworks, abstractions and more.


presented at and with
NOW INSTANT IMAGE HALL