Acid Mothers ARE in Glasgow... (part 1)

There’s a crack through the landscape of my late teaching career. At one end, we have Acid Mothers Temple (the last band that I loved to distraction, at least for a few years). At the other, we have Forced Entertainment. They convinced me, through Bloody Mess, that the energy I had chased in music had migrated into theatre.

Acid Mothers Temple are back on Saturday. Last night I saw Forced Entertainment’s latest. I guess this now counts as nostalgia.

I have never really been that enthusiastic about AMT’s recordings. Part of this is age and equipment: I don’t have the high end stereo to blast out their psychedelic jams at a volume that allows the nuances of riff and feedback and distortion to play out in my living room. I also worry about the neighbours – something my teenage self would not have been too concerned about.

In fact, apart from the triple CD compilation, which includes a sixty minute version of the song that played live every time I saw them, was the only AMT release that I have adored: mainly because it compiled their various alliances and side-projects. I tend to find more joy in main-man Kawabata Motoko’s solo exercises. They fit in more with the minimal ambient noise that makes up my bedtime listening action.

But Acid Mothers Temple in concert… it’s a pleasure too Dionysian to resist. Although the basic template is consistent – they are a loud, rambling yet brutally focused outfit who pastiche 1970s’ progressive rock – the subtle line-up changes made each show different enough to make collecting the set crucial. Maybe they’d add a drummer, replace a vocalist: each change was announced with an additional phrase to the band’s name (possibly referring to an obscure Gnostic idea). But the slight tilt in direction was enough. AMT were finding new ground in an apparently featureless landscape.

I guess they satisfy the two extremes of my soul: the paradox at the heart of the band is the paradox of my own emotional confusion. On the one hand, they appear to be revivalists, harking back to a time when rock valued aggression as a tool to expanding the mind. They evoked the late hippy conflagration, when Hawkwind sketched out ceremonies of outer and inner space, just before musical competence soured into self-conscious displays of technical expertise. They drone, they wail, guitars all so masculine and relentless.

Yet they seem so fresh, as if each bludgeoning drama is being conjured accidentally, from a jazz spirit of improvisation.

Part of my soul is enchanted by the subtle interplay of very loud guitars, and the way they rediscover predictable strategies and cast them in passionate, even original, new directions. It is an erudite game of spectatorship, discerning the nuance of the old and refitting it as new.

The other part of me recognises them as the greatest dance band in the history of rock, a supple funkiness driving on the assault of noise. 

SHEZAD DAWOOD PRESENTS PIERCING BRIGHTNESS AT GLASGOW FILM THEATRE

London-based visual artist Shezad Dawood will visit Glasgow Film Theatre on Sunday 6 October to take part in a Q&A session following a screening of his feature film début Piercing Brightness. Screening as part of GFT’s strand ‘Crossing the Line’, which explores the cross over between visual art and narrative cinema, this eerily beautiful science fiction film is as experimental as it is entertaining.

The Crossing the Line films are usually good value - although they come from the visual art tradition, which has a habit of disguising a lack of technical skill as being aesthetic rather than laziness, the curation on this strand is generally strong. Besides, it's science fiction: what could go wrong?

The film opens with two youths landing in a spaceship outside Preston. Their mission: to re-establish contact and affect the retrieval of the 'Glorious 100' sent to earth millennia ago in human form to study and observe the development of another race. After making contact with one of the 100, now a Pakistani shopkeeper (Bhasker Patel), they discover that many of their kind have become corrupted, forgetting their original purpose and slowly becoming influenced by and in turn influencing their adopted home...

Hang on, I am interested now: I like the juxtaposition of alien civilisations and Preston. It makes sense that alien observers would go to Preston, though. It's a bit like the junction between Liverpool and Manchester, where trains can be changed and a nice walk can be taken up the high street while you wait to escape.

Inspired by Lancashire having the highest rate of UFO sightings in the UK, as well as hosting one of the earliest splinter Mormon communities in the world, Piercing Brightness uses Preston and its inhabitants as a springboard to investigate religious, racial and class-based social hierarchies.

Yes, this is going beyond an easy joke to being something interesting - a meditation on belonging and absence, perhaps?

Piercing Brightness is scripted by cult novelist Kirk Lake, with an original score by Makoto Kawabata of Acid Mothers Temple (Japan) and features music by Alexander Tucker.

Wait a minute... can we read that again....

 ...an original score by Makoto Kawabata of Acid Mothers Temple (Japan)... 

I am going to get my tickets.... 



About Shezad Dawood
Dawood's work explores the multiple possibilities engendered by the play between cultures, histories and

fictions. Notions of authorship and representation are deconstructed by working with a steady stream of collaborators mapping cross-cultural influences and trajectories.

Working through film, video and painting Dawood questions the performative process of image-making and dissemination, moving through various points of identification and visual systems such as science fiction and the occult.

Dawood openly engages with various devices from avant-garde theatre, the conventions of art-house and low-budget film-making, to notions of appropriation and a global archive.


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