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Music & Film Wed Sep 23 2015
Le Révélateur Cruise the Back Alleys of Retrofuturism @ Siskel Center
For the inauguration of its 19th(!) year of programming cutting-edge experimental music events in Chicago, Lampo is hosting a rare weeknight event Thursday, Sept. 24 at the Gene Siskel Film Center. As part of its Conversations at the Edge series, the Siskel will host Le Révélateur, the duo of video artist Sabrina Ratté and Godspeed! You Black Emperor/Fly Pan Am's Roger Tellier-Craig.
Even a cursory glance at the project's various video and audio works will detect gestures and references to previous eras of electronic audio and visual experimentation. Tellier-Craig's analogue synth work avoids the cough-syrup murk of Tangerine Dream in favor of an ecstatic, lonely, sparkling tone, closer to Popul Vuh's work on Herzog's film Heart of Glass. It achieves that rare combination of eternity mixed with melancholy, the heart-hurt realization that the afterlife lasts a long, long time. Meanwhile, Ratté's visuals use '80s visual iconography as their starting point -- black fields with grid lines, hallways, gradient-prismatic color squares, juxtapositions of slate gray and sherbet swaths all creatively distorted, doubled, and magnetically interrupted for your edification. Elsewhere, watery textures cut into hard geometric shapes suggest badly sun-faded New Age meditation videos, a Calm Blue Ocean that just happens to be neon orange and electric chartreuse. The mix of the two is both charmingly nostalgic and also interested in pushing toward the future -- you've seen these types of images before, but they're presented here with legitimate urgency and palpable menace.
Tickets for this event are $11, $6 for Siskel Center members. The event begins at 7pm.
