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Sonic Oddities Live is a live Cinema-Sound collaboration featuring image/curator Stephen Parr and the Bangalore based experimental act The Indian Sonic Research Organisation performing off-kilter improvised music. Sonic Oddities is Stephen Parr’s cinematic and auditory collision of film shorts, clips, fragments and reprocessed sounds. Drawn from his company, Oddball Films” 50,000-16mm film archive, this cinematic trek through the auditory oddities of film history features bizarre commercials, Religious propaganda films, campy movie trailers and Italian Spy films colliding with scenes and sounds of bush-devil dancers, audio test tones and European animation. More than just cinema accompanied by live music, Sonic Oddities Live sonically explores the hidden seams in cinematic odds and ends, creating new perceptual and auditory contexts in the sound/cinema experience.
Films, Shorts Clips Include:
The quirky claymation short Gumby Concerto (B W, 1963), United Airline’s Fly the Friendly Skies commercial spot, the religious propaganda short Eucharist, the percussion-based Fantasy of Feet, The bizarre Bell Labs “science-of-sound” clip Two Heads are Better than One (Color, 1961, Bell Labs), the surrealistic Salvador Dali-like The Big Sneeze, the indescribable animated and sound-affected Queer Birds, an arty Italian James Bond-like thriller clip Italian Exciter (Color, 1960s), the Jimi Hendrix-like virtuosity of the famed Eddie “Banjo King” Peabody (B W, 1930s), a rare 1940s NYC Bowery Bum slanged-out press conference, Why Work?, The Florida Sunshine Tree with beauty queen Anita Bryant, the AV promo Is a Career in Radio and Television for You? and many offbeat, wondrous and truly one-of-a-kind cinematic film clips and montages.
About Stephen Parr:
Stephen Parr is an archivist, image maker and curator. Parr produced and videotaped live performances in the seventies, including John Cage, Timothy Leary and The Ramones. His offbeat film programs incorporate archival footage in their cine-mix of historic, ethnographic and technological pop culture, and have been screened at venues around the world. They have explored the erotic underbelly of sex-in-cinema (The Subject is Sex), the offbeat and bizarre (Oddities Beyond Belief), the pervasive effects of propaganda (Historical/Hysterical?) and oddities from his archives (Strange Sinema). Parr currently curates Oddball Films a twice weekly film series, and is the director of Oddball Film Video (www.oddballfilm.com), a San Francisco stock footage company, providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Summer of Love and We Live in Public, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US.
About The Indian Sonic Research Organisation:
The Indian Sonic Research Organisation is a collective of artists, musicians and scientists. Their live performances are usually accompanied by home made instruments often incorporating technologies both new and obsolete. In the past,they have performed with instruments varied from earthworms to theramins.They have performed in venues and festivals around the world and are currently working on building infrastructural spaces for musicians and artists in Bangalore to create and explore the sonic arts.
VENUE: Jagaa Creative Common Ground (http://www.jaaga.in/), Rhenius Street, Off Richmond Road, Opposite the Hockey Association Stadium main gate, Shanthinagar, Bangalore
TIME: 6.30pm
DATE: Saturday 5th February 2011
Please do come and please spread the word….
For more information send your queries to experimentaindia@gmail.com
CLICK to preview clip of Sonic Oddities live.
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