Tales of the Uncanny and the Soggy

Tales of the Uncanny is one of the original horror films, German Expressionism, made in 1919--the acting is overwrought, the makeup is terrifying, the stories are not scary so much as silly, and occasionally unsettling. So naturally, it was the perfect choice of film for Luminato (in association with NxNE and the Gothe-Institut) to show on the seventh day of the festival. Of course, for most people at the Dundas Square show on the 11th, the film was less of a draw than the soundtrack.

Do Make Say Think, Owen Pallett, and Robert Lippok got together and played the accompaniment in their respective styles. They alternated sections, meaning there was not as much collaboration as I had originally hoped, although there was more near the end of the show. Do Make Say Think's answer to "The Suicide Club" (from a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson) worked out incredibly well--their trademark brass chords and shots aligned perfectly with the rising tension and climax of the story. Owen Pallett's first piece was fantastic, too, made up exclusively of looped pizzicatos and delicate bowing; techniques that has become almost endangered since the introduction of a keyboard to Final Fantasy's live shows. Robert Lippok (an electronic artist from Berlin) had some excellent and well-executed sounds, but they didn't carry the same emotional weight as the other acts--it didn't seem to complement the film style with any kind of colour or flair, although it certainly wasn't jarring.

There were several things that made the show unique: first, location. Dundas Square is sleek and modern, brightly flickering ads, billboards, and screens line the sky and vie for attention, providing a contrast with Tales that was at first distracting, and then intriguing. Second, it was raining throughout the entire show. Once again, there were upsides and downsides; the rain echoed the static and distortion of the film, one trombonist played the second half of the concert with an umbrella, and listening to plucked violin, electronica, and post rock in the rain is a pleasure right up there with happy pop tunes in the sun--but there was the Umbrella Dilemma: do you put up your umbrella, stay dry, and block the view of all the people behind you, or do you stand in the rain and get drenched? Conundrum.

Photo credit to semitones.