Piercing Brightness (2012)

From http://i.jeded.com/i/piercing-brightness.16675.jpg

Director: Shezad Dawood

Screenplay: Kirk Lane

Cast: Houda Echouafni (as Mask); Chen Ko (as Jiang); Tracy Brabin (as Maggie); Samantha Elizabeth Edwards (as Nikki); Paul Leonard (as Warner); Jennifer Lim (as Shin); Bhasker Patel (as Naseer Khan); Derek Siow (as Lee)

Synopsis: In the city of Preston, aliens have for decades lived hidden amongst humans disguised as the Earthling's own. Two more aliens, disguised as a young Chinese brother and sister (Ko and Lim) appear and meet a veteran who has been on Earth for a long time (Patel), disguised as an older Pakistani man who runs a corner store, who is both incredibly glad to see them and offers a pure white room in his home for them to stay. Their appearance is timely as aliens who live in the town are in debate in-between finally revealing themselves to mankind and trying to return back home. Amongst those who are caught up within this are a single mother (Brabin), a UFO enthusiast, who realises that she may not be who she thinks she is, her adult daughter who meets a bald, Chinese guy around her age and strikes up a bond with, and an alien disguised as an older male counsellor who is the one instigating the idea of revealing their true forms to humanity. As sinister hoodies stalk the aliens, and Acid Mother Temple acid rock scores the scenes, it's culminates in transcendental revelations.

From http://i.imgur.com/f35aiUg.jpg

Piercing Brightness from that synopsis does sound awesome, only for it to have plenty of great ideas and a lot to like but a structural flaw that cripples it, it's presentation deeply flawed from the beginning. The best thing to take from the film is its premise, the alien placed into the ordinary environment, in this case an English city. Something innately about an English environment, both the countryside or an urban landscape, is so drastically different from the American cities and countryside of their sci-fi that to imagine a UFO over a Spar shop in my neck of the woods, even in London, is strange because of me being fed on Hollywood science fiction and their locations for years. Especially if you depict the England as here of corner shops and nightclubs, cups of tea and breakfasts  in cafes, it's incredibly odd as does setting it in Scotland or any other member of the British Isles, something which was as much the reason why Jonathan Glazer's Under The Skin (2013), with Hollywood star Scarlet Johansson stepping out of her comfort zone and becoming an alien, was so eerie and unique. Piercing Brightness takes advantage of these cafes and nightclubs, soaking in the pleasant, sometimes frankly bland mood of such environments in bright, crisp cinematography, the kind of environments where it's the people within it that really give it some much needed colour, an advantage this has in its cast and because it's all about aliens and can get away with an unconventional use of such locations.

From http://creativebench.tv/assets/Piercing-Brightness-001-Jason-R-Moffat.jpg

While the aliens are revealed to be of all shapes and sizes, the film can almost work as a metaphor about immigrants entering a new country and having to adapt to the environment, not in a crass jokey way, though the brother alien tries asking for cigarettes in a cafe once, but in terms of the adaptation to the new place followed by the hindsight, the moments of wonder whether it was better to be there or go back to their home world, or whether it's better to revealed oneself as an extraterrestrial being.

When the film succeeds, it's when the aliens express their disappointment with their long waiting, originally part of a project to study the humans, to be sent back home after the promise they had this would be the case, of their position stuck amongst the humans and having to accept their position, rewarding as the initial synopsis suggests it would be. The cast in general helps with this, and there's one single individual, Bhasker Patel as the alien posing as a corner shop owner, who brings the quality of the film up a bar in how he is both charismatic and how this best aspect of the film comes from a lot of his scenes and dialogue, the man more than happy to be amongst the humans, excited like a young man when new aliens like him appear, but melancholic if found in a corner and opened to discussing the position of his life.

From http://www.scifinow.co.uk/wp-content/uploads
/2013/06/Piercing-Brightness-DVD-review.jpg

Technical Detail:

The music as well helps greatly with the film, both from the original score by Alexander Tucker and the choice cuts picked from cult Japanese acid rock group Acid Mother's Temple. Known for being able to release up to four albums minimum a year since they started in 1995, side projects with other bands, and their clear love of psychedelic rock of the sixties from the title puns of their songs and albums, Acid Mother's Temple is the kind of band you'd imagine aliens being scored to, archive footage of UFOs scored in montages to their druggy guitar riffs and making a perfect union together. Especially when the film starts to improve in structure by its middle half to the end, when the music is of greater importance than visual trickery, it helps reach a good build-up to the climax immensely.

From http://static.wixstatic.com/media/77eca5_
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Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist/Experimental

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

The problem, when all the following sounds spot-on and great, is how debuting director Shezad Dawood, originally an artist, decided to put together Piercing Brightness visually and in style. He decided to purposely make the film abstract in tone, intercutting shots of birds at unexpected moments between incidents in a single scene, using colour filters and distorted frames, noises mixing with the music. The result is incredibly clichéd, the stereotype of what an experimental movie is, which becomes distracting rather than abstract in terms of presentation. This is worse as, with only eighty minutes of running time, these techniques and inexplicable shots of birds, strange as a choice when the real UFO footage at least makes sense in context, waste precious time that could've gone to adding more plot about these aliens and their lives. More to the relationship between the adult daughter and her bald headed, quiet friend, at least some explanation to what the hell the faceless hoodies are, chasing the aliens sinisterly on bicycles and molesting one in the least threatening way possible by merely tugging her top and then leaving her alone, at least in the logic of a weird movie plot. The film drastically improved when it gets to the middle of its running time, when its night and the whole plot finishes within this timeframe of one night, the score taking over and being far more effective with some choice editing of snapshots in creating a tone. Unfortunately by this point, despite the improvement, the film has very little of its own character in tone beyond the essentials, the great idea in the centre of the film, even Patel's memorable performance, squandered by the lack of interesting structure.

From https://d28zjewj6xjjqr.cloudfront.net/api/file/LRbErieQmKWOVZ9PjU7h

Personal Opinion:

Piercing Brightness as a result is the heartbreaking example of something that could've been cool or great, but is instead a testament to the dangers of trying too hard, to a detriment, in being an alternative film. Considering the director's art installation origins, the film based on a script from a cult novelist, this is the same mistake that one finds in modern cult genre films particularly the ones trying to be neo-grindhouse movies. I cannot believe I'm comparing this to something like The Man With The Iron Fists (2012) but it's the exact issue paralleled, the tone and style compromising the greater premise and ideas that occasionally survive the structure forced upon them and poke their heads up from the ill-designed surface to shine from brief moments. These moments, like those neo-grindhouse movies, aren't enough to save Piercing Brightness; just when you fancy a trippy sci-fi where two sibling aliens see a female alien with computer chip parts stuck to her face on the TV instructing them with esoteric words, such a delight is spoilt by the packaging being detrimental to the point it effects the quality of such moments.

From http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q80/trungcang/
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Music of the Abstract: Rocket Number Nine by Sun Ra

For the first time in this feature the subject is a jazz composition, a genre of music that can include some of the most experimental music possible. My first knowledge of Sun Ra, fittingly for a blog devoted to abstract cinema, came from the maligned cult film Space Is The Place (1974), the same title as the famous album Rocket Number Nine comes from, an attempt for the late Sun Ra to promote his message that was yet spliced into a longer cut with blaxploitation elements that he was not impressed with.

Rocket Number Nine is a great way to begin with the album of the same title, even if it's the last track, containing both the more unconventional sounds heard throughout it but at its most playful. A fitting introduction to a man and his Arkestra orchestra who are just as fascinating for the concept and ideals around them as the music is. As someone who has properly gotten into Sun Ra through the Space Is The Place album, I recommend it to anyone else as a starting point as well. 

Music of the Abstract: Leyendecker by Battles

To begin 2016, the unlikely meeting of electronics and percussion creates a beautiful three minute pop song. Battles suddenly became big in 2007, including a memorable performance of Atlas on the Jools Holland Show in the UK, and what makes this particular song and the album it comes from stand is the importance of all the instruments, from voice to guitars, in adding to the rhythm. There is an alien yet utterly hummable beat to all the songs off the album Mirrored, math rock which is yet possible to dance to. It also helps that, with his ridiculously high snare cymbal, the band had the drummer from Helmet amongst the group.

Bizarrely I never went beyond the first album despite adoring it. If there's something to rectify its catching up with the two other LPs they made up to date.

Music of the Abstract: Mr. Armageddon by Locomotive

It has been a while since I've completed a Music of the Abstract article, so to compensate for a lack of a main review during Christmas week, I offer a sample of lush psychedelic rock. Heavy use of orchestra, no lead guitar and very memorable lyrics throughout the album contribute to something that, going through it for the first time, manages to skirt the twee that I find in a few British albums from between the late sixties and early seventies without losing grit to it.

Unfortunately Locomotive only released the album Mr. Armageddon comes from, We Are Everything You See (1970), never to create anything beyond it. For every band that managed to do well in the seventies, even as a cult group, many are left with a sole shining gem of an LP only before they vanish. Thankfully these one-offs, including Locomotive's, can even be found on Spotify.

Music of the Abstract: I'm Going Slightly Mad by Queen

Out of all the hits and well known songs in their canon, enough to fill three compilations, I've always had this as my favourite Queen song. Part of it is the darkness of the lyrics knowing that after the album this comes off, Innuendo (1991), Freddie Mercury would die of an AID effected illness in what was and still is seen as a tragedy, knowing that he could've been making music still to this day. Yet I'm Going Slightly Mad, especially seeing the music video above with the song, is hilarious at the same time, a darken humour that's very droll, a very English sense of wit. The disorientated, almost backward played, guitar solo in the middle reminds me of a very trippy song back from the Sixties.

It shouldn't be strange that Queen should appear in this article as, even as they hit the mainstream, there was still an unpredictability to them, a willingness to bring a variety of genres together into a single album let alone over a span of them. Bohemian Rhapsody, their most famous song, isn't exactly a conventional three minute pop song, a rock opera with an a cappella in the centre of the track that is as indulgent as you can get and loved for that reason. Even on Innuendo itself, while with more conventional hard rock and pop songs in comparison to other albums, there's still a flamenco guitar passage in the title track and another song about Freddie Mercury's beloved cat amongst them. 

Music of the Abstract: Nocturnal Fury by Satori

Sadly due to the work I needed to complete for the Halloween 31 For 31 season, I had to neglect the following series, more irritating as I promised a series of seasonally appropriate choices for the weeks covering October. Now that Halloween has finished, I can thankfully bring this back starting with a track I was originally going to bring up during the month. It's rare to catch a band or artist you've never heard of and fell swept away on first hearing, especially if you don't live in an environment where there's record stores and have to rely on the radio and its Top 40 tracks and songs. Even if they are good, you've heard songs on the many times before or had advance warning of the terrible ones. With Satori I have nothing in terms of context for them baring the album Nocturnal Fury comes from, Kanashibari (2008), and only some basic information, a British group that has existed since the late eighties and has fluctuated in the musicians it had since its creation. I merely heard an ominous mix of pure noise and sounds coming from the speakers of a second hand book and music store in Sheffield, and in a moment either of rashness or desire, asked to buy the CD that being played itself. I have no regrets and this would not be the only time I bought a CD from that store in the midst of it being played, causing one to wonder what the store owners kept thinking of me forcing them to have to switch albums for the rest of the day's work.

Ambient and electronic music which has no big beats is an area I've yet to even dip a toe into, not even the work of Brian Eno explored by me. It is both perfect background music, not a dismissive comment at all, but also can be fully immersed in. Listening to such hair raising electronic groans and screeches as in the chosen track in a music store pushes one into a certain heightened mood from the moment a track or whole album's worth of them start, and it's not surprising the album cover for Kanashibari is a replication of The Nightmare (1781) by Henry Fuseli. Itself a potent piece of art, the attempt to replicate such imagery in the darkened and ethereal music with the CD is done with commendable hard work.

Music of the Abstract: Hamburger Lady by Throbbing Gristle

From fun heavy metal to one of the most legitimately disturbing songs I've ever encountered, so much so I'm including a warning for any readers of this post to play the video at their own precaution. Not inherently because anyone who listens to it will be disturbed, but because after the first sounds I heard hearing it in a CD compilation, it lifted the hairs on the back of my neck. Throbbing Gristle are one of the most acclaimed but also most notorious bands to come from Britain, and deciding to base a song lyrically on a letter documenting a real life female burn victim, nicknamed the "Hamburger Lady" because of the severity of the burn injuries, is as unsettling as you can get. Setting this to electronic drones that, for a 1978 released song, sound like they were composed yesterday, a monotonous throb offset by various scratching noises, just adds to the horror of the material. 

Music of the Abstract: Solitude by Candlemass

The start of Halloween and beginning with of one of the origins of Doom Metal, in a song which has captivated me and shows what a Heavy Metal song should be. Not only are the lyrics evocative but this is heavy without need of death grunts, sung with clear vocals by Johan Längqvist, and being extreme not in noise and chaotic guitar parts, but by going back to the originators of Heavy Metal, Black Sabbath, and making their riffs even deeper and sluggish. Finally hearing a song by Candlemass was quite a revelation.

Music of the Abstract: Heir Apparent by Opeth

October is soon approaching and that means Halloween as well. It's feels suitable to start making each of these entries for the entire month based around music that unsettles or suits the moodiness of the month, beginning a little bit earlier still in September with Opeth...

That Opeth have transitioned from progressive death metal to progressive rock over their records shows a great concern with exploring the possible reaches of the band's music. Many an obscure prog rock album has been referenced as inspiring the band or in the wheelhouse of taste of its central figure Mikael Åkerfeldt, and from the acoustic guitar to the various musical sections of this particular song, the diversity found in just a single track off an album of theirs is apparent. Plus in this particular case, you cannot say they've lost the death metal influence even if there are no blast beats. if I want to start off the October session with atmosphere, this is as moody as you could get.

Music of the Abstract: The Gift by The Velvet Underground

Spoken word in music is something I've little knowledge of, but the following is an exceptionally good one to start with. Based on a story written by the late Lou Reed in his college days, it's also the backing music itself that makes this work as perfectly as it does, particularly when you hear the music through one speaker and the story through the other. Worthy of mention is that there is a 1997 short film by Michael Egan on IMDB, a film that I'd gladly see out of curiosity.

Music of the Abstract: My White Bicycle by Tomorrow

I like psychedelic music. Psychedelic culture in general. I can't deny the hippies made some terrible mistakes, but the music was at least inspired and innovative. As a heavy metal fan I have to thank the existence of psychedelic rock instantly, and the various audio innovations and experiments a simple, silly sounding ditty could have are wonderful to hear. I discovered Tomorrow in a compilation of psychedelic bands, the sole album sadly of a band who were unfairly treated to the point even the LP cover couldn't be in colour for cost. My White Bicycle is a song about riding a bicycle, a charming one, but it's the backward sound loops and the guitar solo played in reverse that stands out the most and why I play the song continually. If only Tomorrow were able to have released a second LP. 

Music of the Abstract: Requiem by Killing Joke

Killing Joke is slowly becoming one of my favourite bands, and that I have countless albums to dive through from their history excites me. Like their own biography, the music itself is just as unpredictable and for the better.

Music of the Abstract: Goat $hit by Shit and Shine

Something more current for this mini-feature. I came across the band's 2015 release 54 Synth-Brass, 38 Metal Guitar, 65 Cathedral in an alternative music and book store in Sheffield, and was immediately interested in it from its bold cover design and a band name that is certainly censored on iTunes. Like with cinema, it's difficult for me to keep up with current music especially as I want to keep looking out for older material I've yet to discover and that, honestly, I find my tastes usually the completely opposite of most critics and popular opinion. I fear its snobbery continually when I think this, but its more that like many people my personal taste is very distinctive of myself, and that what is seen as popular in a consensus online is a culminated opinion which excludes the tangents in personal taste many have. That you have to balance out how expensive buying CDs, even MP3s, can be and the time it may takes to give something a chance even for free on a site like Spotify, nothing to get the cellos out to play a tragic song for, but meaning that I prefer to gamble with something older that I've heard great (or notorious) things about or have a moment of curiosity for, like with purchasing 54 Synth-Brass, 38 Metal Guitar, 65 Cathedral because the cardboard sleeve the disc is in looked interesting.

The album is great, which shows that over a century or so of electronic based music there is still so many unique sounds you can produce in the genre let alone others like rock etc. It's a great album just for the hellishly thick beats in each track, the sort of tracks that would be awesome to dance to in a nightclub, and there is no sense of repetition each one. Willing to use anything from real instruments, vocal samples, even a krautrock inspired use of a repetitious drum beat, some of the lengthy tracks on this album switch rhythms halfway through themselves almost creating two different songs within the same one. That this particular choice is a remix of another song, Hide From The Sun by Goat, shows how much cool music there still is being made either as a new composition or a new composition which rifts from a pre-existing one to create a hybrid. 

Music of the Abstract: Daddy Cool by Boney M.

If there is a music genre that led to such divisive opinions about it, disco is up there. On one hand, an unbelievably popular genre of music. On the other hand, how many other genres of music have had a campaign against, such as when on July 12, 1979, at the Chicago baseball stadium Comiskey Park, a D.J. called Steve Dahl blew up disco records in a promotion that ended up with riots?. Like any other genre when it becomes very popular and mainstream, disco became like what would happen to punk after and progressive rock before, forced back into the underground or diverge into various sub-genres. I confess though that, just listening to a disco compilation album, you realise how good the music actually is. After growing up with Disco Stu from The Simpsons as a child, it's amazing for me to see even how mainstream disco songs could be very experimental or very odd. Donna Summer's I Feel Love managed to be proclaimed the future of music by Brian Eno, and the influence is still profound to this day. Also think of Rasputin by Boney M., the story of the infamous Russian monk, who was tricked into drinking cyanide and was shot multiple times before his assassins even managed to kill him, set to an insanely danceable beat using balalaikas. It managed to get to number 2 in the British charts and has a folk heavy metal cover version by Turisas. How many songs today would be so esoteric in their subject matter and sound compared to the countless party tracks of now?

Boney M as a group has aspects that might surprise some. German music producer Frank Farian put the group together and also provided most of the vocals in the studio. Also the original Love For Sale album cover would've be eyebrow raising back in the seventies let alone now. Yet the music is good and knowing how beloved it is, members of the group touring performing the songs long after Boney M was officially disbanded, makes how enjoyable of the songs greater. While a bit of a left term for this article in terms of being very well known, a song like Daddy Cool really stands out for how its constructed as music, very danceable indeed but also very unconventional compared to a lot of pop music now. My interest in Boney M also has a filmic connection. One of my most beloved scenes in any film I've seen, from one of my favourite films of the last decade, comes from the incredible comedic-drama Tulpan (2008), a film from Kazakhstan directed by Sergey Dvortsevoy, where the protagonist and his best friend drive through the Kazakh desert at high speed singing and bopping along to Rivers of Babylon. If anything else, that and the sets in the video above are appropriate for this site, giant mushroom in the background of the video and all.

Music of the Abstract - Osaka Bondage by Naked City

How much can you cram into a single minute of a song? In the Eurovision Song Contest each entry has to be around three minutes maximum, forcing one to have to create the perfect ditty to win. Three minutes is said to be the perfect length for a song, but punk managed to need less time than that. Napalm Death managed to encapsulate the concept of suffering in 1.316 seconds. The latter might sound absurd, but the grindcore subgenre of metal is not only responsible for some of the most intense music I can hear, but it enforces how much you can cram in only a minute or so and still make a full song with multiple complex structures to it. Sprinkle its influence over avant-garde jazz, and you get Naked City, the second time musician John Zorn appears here and will likely not be the last for him either. Probably what makes this selected song better is knowing there's a great sense of fun behind it as well like a lot of great confrontational music, especially when the jaunty piano piece kicks in...

Music of the Abstract: Kokoro by Far East Family Band

Ethereal Japanese space rock that literally sounds like one is travelling interplanetary when listening to it. I was lucky enough, during my various volunteer jobs during a long stretch of unemployment, to meet an older male volunteer who specialised in electronics who collected numerous and incredibly obscure bands and musicians on CD and in various forms. Sadly not long after we started sharing a bond for the type of music today's choice represents, the place we volunteered at descended into petty politics and I have sadly not been able to keep in contact with him. I thank him however, if I ever bump into him again, for introducing me to this song and various other bands who'll appear in these posts, and opening me up to "abstract" music the same as I am for films.

Music of the Abstract: Golem II - The Bionic Vapour Boy by Mr. Bungle

Sadly not the most prolific bands, but Mr. Bungle went from Mike Patton's high school band to fame, making the world a better place through their weird meshing of various music genres in the same song let alone the same album. Their demo albums are a tantalising what-if for me to heard, but they only released three official albums before they sadly disappeared off the face of the earth. (And sadly we can probably blame Anthony Kiedis from Red Hot Chilli Peppers for some of this). The truly strange metal of their self-titled, John Zorn produced debut (1991), the difficult, very experimental second album Disco Volante (1995) which I am still trying to grasp, and my favourite, California (1999). California takes the debut's stew of various musical types but makes the songs significantly shorter, somehow taking the weirdness of Butthole Surfers and their predecessors and making it poppy without compromising their unpredictability.

The following above is a great example of this, more so when you discover what the lyrics are like I have recently. Disco rock by way of various tangents and Jewish mythology, and it should've been a Top Ten hit like most of the songs on the album. That Patton would go on to be part of various other bands, and also found Fantômas, is like the as-of-yet unopened gift that keeps on giving to me.

Music of the Abstract: F.C. The Freedom Club by Sleepytime Gorilla Museum

Of Natural History (2004) by the prog metal, art rock group Sleepytime Gorilla Museum has been with me as an album of songs for many years now since hearing it for the first time. Songs off it have grown to be some of the best I listen to, and I have barely scrapped into the world of the live performances and other music of the (sadly disbanded) American group. Using hand built instruments, the album includes stories of creatures ruling over humanity, field recordings of nature, a recorded interview with a Southern man which includes the topic of preventing one's knife from being lost stuck in someone else, and the song picked today, an ode to the dangers of technology. Is it hypocritical to make such a song when people like myself discovered this band through the internet and iTunes? Doesn't matter when the song is haunting and aggressive. 

And I thank the YouTube user who created the fan-made video for today's song choice. Appropriately disorientating for the complex time signatures and chaotic noise that takes place in all ten minutes of the song.

Music of the Abstract: Riots by FM Einheit

Decoder (1984), by the one named Muscha, is the kind of film that should've been a wider known cult movie but isn't that easy to see unless you look to European DVDs and online. Set in a totalitarian cyberpunk metropolis where subliminal music used in a fast food franchise is subverted by anarchists to change the world, its a unique work that's stuck with me since viewing it in a fuzzy pictured form years ago. Its more of a mood piece than an elaborate narrative but its stayed with me for its colorful, dank atmosphere and how different from other sci-fi dystopia films it was. 

Alongside a cameo by William S. Burroughs, the onscreen and musical contributions by the likes of Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle and FM Einheit alongside bands like Einstürzende Neubauten is probably the most distinct aspect of Decoder. As of June 2015, the original soundtrack by these individuals and more is available on British and American iTunes, and I give you the following as a nice taster of its electronic hamper.

Music of the Abstract: The Lilac Hand of Menthol Dan by Marc Bolan (1967/68)

Someone cannot just live off cinema only. There has to be other hobbies, and there are plenty of areas where the term "Abstract" appears quite frequently especially in music. Its fascinated me, through podcasts, blogs and interacting with people, how individuals can be cold to "difficult" cinema yet it is easier to for many to accept and love the more unconventional sounds and genres of music, to the point they can even become Top 10 songs and albums. It can''t be denied music is more universal, and it feels like even the membrane between the mainstream and the experimental is very, very thin, vast sub-genres to trawl through and enough musicians who could fill an entire asylum band on offer in your local media store. It feels apt to indulge in a track a week, and the first perfectly encapsulates the above view, a musician my own mother grew up loving but fitting the site at the same time:

Even as the figurehead of T. Rex, a band that I have fallen in love with as my mother and many in the seventies did, Marc Bolan in his brief tenure in life was magnificently odd in his music, where even hit number 1 and 2 songs in Britain like Ride A White Swan are lyrically and musically unconventional as you hum along with them. The following above, while not directly connected to T. Rex, is unbelievably catchy even with breaking glass as a percussion instrument.