Roarke Menzies will celebrate the release of his sophomore album, CORPOREAL, at Sunnyvale on April 7 (photo by Josh Simpson)
Who: Roarke Menzies, Imaginary Tricks, the Despot, Breanna Barbara, O Paradiso
What: Album release party for Corporeal
Where: Sunnyvale Brooklyn, 1031 Grand St. at Morgan Ave., 347-987-3971
When: Thursday, April 7, $7, 9:00
Why: This past October, we talked to New York City-based artist and composer Roarke Menzies about his debut solo album, Shapes. The Vancouver-born, Brooklyn-based Menzies, who also composes electronic scores for film, dance, and spoken-word theater (with Paul Rome), hasn’t wasted much time, already preparing to release his sophomore album, Corporeal. “A blank hard drive — no memories, just structure, architecture, an empty page — is marked with human data: mouth sounds, sung melodies, lips, teeth, breath, traces of bodily presence,” he states about the project. “Corporeal is a series of musical collages that consider the repetitive, hypnotic acts of the body in performance, as well as the storied, figurative romance — utopian and fatal — between human and machine.” The seven songs, which feature such titles as “For Vinyl-Covered Stages,” “Flicker Film,” “Apparatus or Caress,” and “The Wake,” combine found and created sounds with mysterious vocals to create atmospheric aural adventures that come alive with the rattle and hum of real life. As Menzies describes, “A voice echoes down an audio cable. A sewing machine is cranked by human hands. Fists pound and beat on a sheet of steel.” Menzies will be the release of Corporeal on April 7 at Sunnyvale in Brooklyn; also on the bill are Imaginary Tricks, the Despot, and Breanna Barbara, with DJ sets by O Paradiso. You can find out more about the event here and check out a sample song and pick up the album here.
Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie was meant to be a kind of public eulogy for her beloved mother, Natalia (Nelly) Akerman, who died in 2014 at the age of eighty-six, shortly after Chantal had completed shooting forty hours of material with her. But it also ended up becoming, in its own way, a public eulogy for the highly influential Belgian auteur herself, as she died on October 5, 2015, at the age of sixty-five, only a few months after the film screened to widespread acclaim at several festivals (except at Locarno, where it was actually booed). Her death was reportedly a suicide, following a deep depression brought on by the loss of her mother. No Home Movie primarily consists of static shots inside Nelly’s Brussels apartment as she goes about her usual business, reading, eating, preparing to go for a walk, and taking naps. Akerman sets down either a handheld camera or a smartphone and lets her mother walk in and out of the frame; Akerman very rarely moves the camera or follows her mother around, instead keeping it near doorways and windows. She’s simply capturing the natural rhythms and pace of an old woman’s life. Occasionally the two sit down together in the kitchen and eat while discussing family history and gossip, Judaism, WWII, and the Nazis. (The elder Akerman was a Holocaust survivor who spent time in Auschwitz.) They also Skype each other as Chantal travels to film festivals and other places. “I want to show there is no distance in the world,” she tells her mother, who Skypes back, “You always have such ideas! Don’t you, sweetheart.” In another exchange, the daughter says, “You think I’m good for nothing!” to which the mother replies, “Not at all! You know all sorts of things others don’t know.”
