Music of the Senufo

Unesco Music of the Senufo LP is going down really well this morning. Minimal xylophone textures from in and around Mali and Côte d'Ivoire. Listen here. Mixes up seamlessly with The Garnet Toucan.

Illumination

So I had to remove the Oskar Fischinger post as there was a copyright complaint. Oh well. Friday we watched a Polish movie called Iluminacja, by Krzysztof Zanussi. I never thought a film about physics could be so beautiful. Of course it's about a lot of other things as well. The main character is a graduate student trying to juggle life and love and research, with little success. But this portrait of the physicist as a young man also includes documentary-like detours into the ethics of science, including interviews with young Polish physicists about war and a sequence filmed in what appears to be an actual mental hospital. That makes it sound a bit heavy going, but it's really quite stylish and fun, like a Polish Poor Cow with brief science and harpsichord interludes.

I thought it might be fun to do something of a year end list in the next few days, so keep an eye out for that. Not a best-of-2012 so much as a loose set of impressions and directions for 2013. We'll see...

Liesbeth List

Looking for me (1970)

Looking for me is an educational documentary from 1970, directed by Virginia Bartlett and starring dance therapist Janet Adler and the students of the Shady Lane School in Pittsburgh. Adler is a pioneer in movement therapy. This film is famous for a sequence involving her sessions with two autistic children, initially diagnosed as "psychotic." In the first clip below she slowly befriends them, mirroring their movements in order to build a bridge of trust. Watch the whole clip, take in the melancholy hypnotic music, and see if a tear doesn't come to your eye when she finally breaks through at 5:20.

How to Make Electronic Music (1975)

Russell Drake, Ronald Herder and Anne D. Modugno, How to Make Electronic Music (Educational Audio Visual Inc., 1975).

Tana Hoban

Tana Hoban, Push Pull Empty Full (Collier, 1972).

(Mary Barnes and the door to her room at Kingsley Hall.)