Welcome to the weekend and our Friday Double Feature. Each week we’ll recommend two films, shorts, documentaries, music videos, video art pieces, etc. These will include, but not be limited to, works by Texas filmmakers. If you have a lead on an upcoming online release that might be fit to debut in this series, drop me a line.
It’s sunset on the way to Rob Buttrum’s house at the end of the weekend. Residual hurricane weather sprayed lavender gauze all over the sky and the windows of cars parked alongside overgrown lots between him and downtown. I know he hasn’t seen it from his den-like living room with its black curtain so I make a joke about staying hydrated and show him a photo on my phone. Buttrum’s good on the sunset. And the water. He sips what looks like beer from a large measuring cup, or maybe a pitcher.
He’s recovering in his own way from what some people consider the hardest party each year, five years running: his birthday party. It’s usually planned around a show rooted in noise music and held at his home, known since 2005 or so as House of Tinnitus. This year he needed more space. A bill of eight acts materialized, with electro-etc. artists coming from as far west as Portland and as far the other way as Brooklyn for the occasion. The location in Dallas was redacted on the flyer. ASK A FREAK, it read.
L.I.E.S records psycho-techno-punk destructor Nick Klein headlined with his house-leaning roadmate Enrique (Miguel Alvariño) before him. S. English, (Shane English) who’s based in Austin, debuted a new set called “Microfilms” that held everyone still with its tension and release, an interlude between stretches of chaos. Buttrum chose not to play tapes as FILTH for his out-of-town friends.
“I wanted to show them people they hadn’t seen, and people that I think are doing some really killer shit – like Crisis Actor and Nancy,” he says.
Those local openers had at least one random tie to the touring artists at Buttrum’s party. For example: David Townsend of Crisis Actor sells handmade noise apparati under the name Electro Lobotomy; it turns out Klein and Alvariño ordered some of his gear and are avid fans. CBN from Omaha made the ten-hour drive straight from a rave they’d thrown the night before. Jonah Lange, a close friend of Buttrum’s who collaborated with him first in 2007 on the free-form sound collage project PSOAS, flew in from Portland on and joined S. English for a revisit to their collaboration Corporate Park. When Lange arrived, it was a total surprise to Buttrum.
“I’ve been working like a dog and haven’t really had much R&R this summer and was really wanting to get a proper Texas Summer Brain Melt in before it was over,” he says. “The desire and opportunity just lined up and I figured I’d show up without any announcement and have a blast with some of my best friends on what was already shaping up to be a rager birthday party. No heat blast this time and definitely too short of a stint, but a definitely a full volume sound bath with some proper maniacs that really set my mind right.”
Back in Buttrum’s living room, we’re insulated by a wall of tapes from his 2000-deep VHS collection. I have to ask him: Is this year a significant birthday, numbers-wise?
“No,” he says. “I just like to party.”
Two early pioneers:
This documentary on modular synths goes beyond its primer cousin I Dream Of Wires to profile Canadian composer and physicist Hugh Le Caine, who’s credited with building some of the first ever electronic instruments.
There’s no shortage of exhaustive BBC material on Delia Derbyshire, the late innovator behind that network’s Radiophonic Workshop and experimental composer. And it’s established how she traced the skeletons of electronic dance music thirty years before they fully animated. But this 2009 short doc by Kara Blake lets Derbyshire wonder aloud about her career and experiences. (At one point she calls herself, with some hesitance, a “post-feminist before feminism was invented.”)
