Featuring the films of Jean Painleve (1902-1989)
Only Connect @ The Barbican, London
20 April 2002
Although Yo La Tengo are most often described in terms of the Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth and Can, you only have to take a look at a setlist from one of their annual fund raising “request” shows to see just how diverse their influences and abilities really are. Sun Ra‘s “Rocket No.9” might sit alongside a Yiddish folk song, only in turn to be followed by a Yes track, a Neil Diamond number, a Ramones tune played in the style of a Taco-Bell commercial, a Wire and a Soft Boys song, or perhaps the theme from Fellini‘s 8½…
Tonight, as part of The Barbican’s Only Connect season, they provide the soundtrack to eight short films by Man Ray and Luis Buñuel contemporary, Jean Painleve. Painleve’s films of sea urchins, jelly fish, sea horses, octopi and liquid crystals have a certain hypnotic quality as well as an offbeat sense of humour that make them rather endearing. His eagerness to describe the undersea-aliens in terms of (often quite odd) human or animal counterparts certainly adds to their charm. The description that accompanies footage of a male sea horse ejaculating clouds of tiny baby sea horses paints his “apprehensive, darting eyes” and gets a laugh from the ladies in the audience while the guys all take a sympathetic, collective in-breath.
Elsewhere, we are invited to imagine a baby sea horse as a “King Charles spaniel”, and a technicolour octopus slithers through the shallows whilst a man in a dress with a moustache and a fat cigar watches from his seat by the sea’s lapping edge. Hidden in the dark beneath the flickering screen, Yo La Tengo provide a soundtrack that adapts effortlessly to the character of each individual film. The vivid technicolour Liquid Crystals is accompanied by a Free-Jazz sonic freakout that momentarily transforms the Barbican into a 1960s Psych-Pop venue. Shrimp Stories gets a Funked-up, frenetic treatment that seems to fit its manic and voracious stars exactly.
Sea Urchins trundle across the ocean floor on innumerable leg-spines to the sound of resonating guitar harmonics drawn out through delay pedals. Ira Kaplan pummels his guitar with his fists, lays on it the floor and hammers away at its neck with a drum brush. Georgia Hubley puts down her drum-sticks to play a wobbly, repetitious farfisa keyboard to The Seahorse, and James McNew swaps his bass duties to sit behind the drums for Acera or The Witches Dance.
All in all, an entertaining, informative and amusing evening. Considering that material from their And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out had dominated recent Yo La Tengo shows, then this concert represented a welcome change of pace and direction. Still, it would have been an extra bonus had the band returned for an encore of “Night Falls on Hoboken” or some other classic from their back-catalogue, but the whole thing is done and dusted by 10:00. Well, that’s the Barbican for you…
-Sean Kitching-
