People Like Us

People Like Us on UbuWeb


Live Score to "Screen Play" by Christian Marclay, 2007, with Ergo Phizmiz



  1. Beginning - 6:23
  2. Enya With Her Accordion - 4:31
  3. Honeysuckle Bollocks - 1:28
  4. Be My Baby Beat - 2:28
  5. Chase 1 - 1:07
  6. Chase 2 - 1:33
  7. Chase 3 - 1:10
  8. Chase 4 - 2:31
  9. Chase 5 - 1:30
  10. Chase 6 - 1:11
  11. Screen End - 6:01
  12. Screen End Opera - 4:43
  13. Fashionette by The Piccadilly Players - 3:13


Credits

""I composed a silent collage of found film footage partially layered with computer graphics to provide a framework in which live music can develop. Moving images and graphics give musicians visual cues suggesting emotion, energy, rhythm, pitch, volume, and duration. I believe in the power of images to evoke sound." Christian Marclay

""Having combined excerpts from Hollywood films to cacophonous effect in previous work, Mr Marclay leapt back in film history, making a demonically spliced silent movie whose visually noisy pulsing black and white sequences were complicated by computer animations of bright, jumpy abstract dots, stripes and shapes reminiscent of work by John Baldessari. It was an extraordinary evening of looking and listening." Roberta Smith, The New York Times

Forming part of The Wire 25 anniversary celebrations marking 25 years of The Wire magazine and co-curated by Electra, London & New York based visual artist and composer Christian Marclay presented the UK premier of Screen Play, a moving image musical score in which found film footage is combined with computer animation to create a visual projection, to be interpreted by live musicians in an evening length performance.

In the tradition of graphic scores, Marclay designed a "video score" combining found footage and computer animation to be interpreted by three small groups of musicians, to initiate performances while leaving ample room for interpretation and improvisation. For the London performance, Marclay assembled three groups made up of a wide-ranging collective of musical talents, including Vicki Bennett, Ergo Phizmiz, Steve Beresford, John Butcher, Roger Turner, Blevin Blectum and J G Thirlwell.

Screen Play follows The Bell And The Glass, Marclay's first experiment with the use of video projection to convey instructions to musicians, which was commissioned by the Reloche ensemble and performed at the Philadelphia Museum Of Art in 2003.

Here are the raw tracks that People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz composed for the live score. You may notice that these experiments then went on to be developed in "Codpaste" and then into "Rhapsody in Glue" (both also on UbuWeb).


RELATED RESOURCES:
Christian Marclay on UbuWeb Sound
Ergo Phizmiz on UbuWeb Sound
This UbuWeb Resource was prepared by Kelly McGilvery.