A Fun Night out with Severed Heads
at the 49th Sydney Film Festival
Dendy Opera Quays, 2 Circular Quay, Sydney.
Monday 17 June at 9.15 pm + Wednesday 19 June at 12 Noon
Severed Heads since 1979
Since 1979, Severed Heads have plied the world with merry songs, performed with warped videos on hand built gear, home computers and chook wire. Even in the top 20, the band was too uncouth for commercial broadcast, while long celebrated by the alternatives. Enjoy over 20 years of underground Australian video music in this programme of favourite clips and live video
jockeying.
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A Fun Night Out with Severed Heads
Severed Heads is a Sydney band. Formed in 1979 and still working, the band has made albums, videos, interactive CD's,websites and lots of strange things out of cardboard. This is a retrospective of some of the band's videos collected, as always, to amuse and entertain. The videos should speak for themselves, or at least lead the viewer to their own conclusion. But perhaps some explanation would be of assistance, especially to those who have just tuned in.
The band is more than twenty years old. In technological years, as old as Queen Mothers and ANZACs. So much has happened in this time, yet a core inspiration has stayed intact. This retrospective demonstrates a constant change in resources, methods and precision - yet a continuing love of humour, surprise and a growing palette of personal symbols. It has something to say about Australian video music in general.
The early years of any artistic entity are based on scarcity. The question is always how - how to afford the materials, how to achieve much with little, how to overcome the quality of the tools. A great part of the results come from problem solving and pushing up against limits. Others had overcome much before Severed Heads - Australian experimental video was teenaged in the late 1970's. But each individual has to struggle to form a vision - experiencing for themselves the small victories that combine into a style.
For scarcity and struggle early Severed Heads video are abstractions, delighting in the distortions of colour and form, submerging the source material in layers and treatments. Images are chosen less for what they are, than how they will stir into the mix. We see crashing airplanes, frogs' legs, circus rides all boiled in a rich stew. Much is purely synthetic, generated from home built video synthesisers and home computers. This is definitely, aggressively video - video as opposed to any of the other visual arts. That is its worth.
It's tempting to apply a 'retro-aesthetic', to smile at the simplicity of the early works and think that the blockiness and blur is somehow cute. This is anachronistic and not the point of this collection. The works were made to the best of the band's ability. See them as you would perhaps a foreign culture.
As technology developed, the limitations retreated and could no longer be blamed. The limits began to be in the imagination - not how, but what, and why. One crisis point came in the mid 1980's when a domestic computer (the Amiga) was able to display a clearly recognisable image. Why use a computer when it became an inferior to a camera? Two main aesthetics soon developed - either to accent the inferiority with reduced colour and resolution or to try to thwart parts of reality with electronic cut and paste. It became ironically harder to create the old abstract format and cut-up eventually became the more valid path.
The early 1990's videos became "chance meetings". Any thing could be layered with any other thing - whether it was mud wrestlers and pianos, shoe headed dolls, a hamburger at a traffic crossing, puppet heads or a faces with borrowed eyes. Reality was invested with an (apparently random) private meaning and it was left to the viewers to make their own sense. The videos claimed - life isn't sad or happy or anything at all. Life is your own confection - demonstrated by a kind of cardboard existentialism.
Some of the symbols thrown up in this period - Mexican candy skulls and shoe heads for example - have stayed in the Severed Heads language as 'potents' - items that hold concentrated meaning. Once cut-up had become exhausted (dots eventually have to be joined) it became necessary to explore these potents in greater control and detail. And so a slow move to virtual reality, where the entire staging, characters and action is scripted to down to fractions. The shoe headed character developed in 1988 was a three-dimensional being by 1993. By the late 1990's the videos are almost exclusively 3D rendered, trying to pin down some pure essence.
We now have an embarrassment of riches. Software video editing, 3D animation, photo realistic imaging - the problem now becomes not what or why to create, but in maintaining a clear vision amid all the distractions, learning curves and possibilities. It has been tempting to rework the older videos to take advantage of the new tools - most of this collection is evidence of that. But nostalgia is partly fear, and should only be given a temporary place.
Severed Heads are at a point where new work has to move into new uneasy places - effectively it becomes how all over again. Given the range of possibilities, which combination will lead to the greatest effect? One path is live video - the "VJ-ing" of images from computers. Another is the transmission of video elements over the Internet for assembly on a display card on the viewer's computer - the "demo scene." Another is a return to videosynthesis and abstraction, but powered by software and informed by all that has gone before. All are young and pimply and lack an aesthetic as yet - disappointment is never far away. But that's exactly where Severed Heads need to be, and will be throughout the next twenty years.
Thank you for your attention, have a fun night out.
The Principal Culprits.
Stephen Jones
Garry Bradbury
Tom Ellard
With
Tony Cornaga
Richard Boulton
Sim Steel
Ian Andrews on Severed Heads
A short pause then 8 track loop stockwhips + moving strobe/ film advance + 2 crows which scream 'NO' and something like 'once more' or 'lets fuck' or something + bass and drums from 'do you love me' Brian Poole and the TremeloesS as well as Brian's solo 'I can really shake em down' + incredibly searing Kawai f100 scream + phaser feedback guitar + Ames brothers who sing'there you are' through flangerS fades intoSS.
Tom Ellard, performance notes for the track Rocket Summer, Severed Heads live at Stranded 4/7/82
Max Ernst defined collage as "the meeting of two distant realities on a plane foreign to both." Well I don't know much about bones but this could easily describe the early music of the Severed Heads. Typically a combination of post-punk, neo-Dada (anti-music) noise, and "cut-up" audio montage. A unique blend of tape loops, electronics (drum machines and synthesisers) and other devices (toy instruments, radios, kitchen utensils and things held together with cardboard and rubber bands).
The group (first called Mr and Mrs No Smoking Sign) which included Tom Ellard and Richard Fielding, recorded their first album (or half album) Earbitten in 1979. This vinyl LP was released on Ellard's own label: Terse. Terse was also a vehicle for the distribution of a large number of cassette releases, which were available in plastic bags for the equivalent price of a 7 inch single ($2.50), including the massive 3 x C90, five album equivalent, One Stop Shopping compilation.
Quite a few years before the arrival of the (affordable) sampling keyboard, the Severed Heads used magnetic tape cut and spliced into loops, in order to make musical use of appropriated sounds. Appropriated sounds were finding their way into the work of groups such as Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle and Negativeland. But the Severed Heads were the first to use tapeloops predominantly as the major structuring element of their compositions, a methodology which became much more common place with use of samplers in the late 80s and 90s.
By their second album: Clean, they had refined this style into a much more musical form of complex electronic sequencing, loops and montage, complimented by Simon Knuckey's rich noise-guitar drones. With Blubberknife, the groups third album (released) on cassette with television parts attached), a new sound begins to emerge. With a new 8-track studio, tapeloops began to be used as complete musical elements rather than repetitive textures. The Severed Heads had developed a unique sound that set them apart from other artists. Garry Bradbury (who had already collaborated on various bits of Mysterious Kitchens
contributed his monumental electro-percussive thuds and crunches and Kawai f100 nastiness, honed in the charnel-house of Hiroshima Chair. Bradbury's explosive dynamics coupled with Ellard's simultaneously complex and childlike electronic
sequences and dumb-arse synthetic basslines, and the tapeloop legacy imparted by the now departed Fielding (who went off to form ZGlutz and the Loop Orchestra), characterised the mature sound of the group. This sound stuck with the band well into the later years when Ellard continued solo with a much more commercial product.
The severed heads have always had a do-it-yourself attitude to video production. When I first met Ellard he was bashing his Commodore 64 home computer with spurious code, forcing its poor little graphic display chip to spew out multicoloured geometric noise, instead of programming it to water his garden (as anyone else would). In 1982 he began working with Steven Jones who, had built his own video synthesiser, a few years earlier. The methods and tools which Jones used, to create abstract video art (video synthesis, oscilloscopes, video feedback, effects, etc.), had affinities with Ellard's use of the sound studio as a musical instrument.
Petrol/ Lower than the Grave/ Nightsong trilogy (1983) utilises video synthesiser, multi-camera feedback, chroma key and colourisation. The clip captures a live performance but the performers (Ellard, Knuckey and Bradbury) are barely discernible under layers of patterns, noise, graphics and saturated colours. In Nightsong the clip reveals more and more of a colourised black and white video tapeloop which gradually degenerates as oxide clogs the heads (this process was assisted by Jones spreading peanut butter over the tape as it spooled).
A similar technique is used in Goodbye Tonsils (1984) to treat a loop of cut-up super-8 film of a crashing airliner shot off a television screen, and in We Have Come to Bless This House (1985 which contains images taken from a longer work: Kato Gets the Girl (30 Min). Ellard with a movie camera, steps outdoors to film ferris wheels, revolving doors, fish and robots, all to be chopped up and thrown into a rich soup of video synthesiser, feedback and PCM data.
Hot with Fleas (1987) features the staccato audio editing of the late Robert Racic. This is the first clip to fully utilise the compositing and animation capabilities of the Commodore Amiga computer. Scissors, knives, guns and what have you career across the screen. The collage approach, which characterised the music, becomes fully integrated into the video production process.
In the late eighties Ellard worked with Richard Boulton, Bradury and Simeon Steel to produce clips which combine digital collage and animation with absurdist costumed buffoonery. In Canine (1987) Ellard wrestles a Hindu grand piano, and in Big Car Retread (1989) he is followed by a strange hamburger bhuto ritual.
The video work of the Severed Heads becomes progressively digital in the nineties. In 1993 Ellard worked with Jason Gee and Fincher Trist to produce 3D animation on the Amiga. In Twister (1993) and Greater Reward (1993) we see 3D which is aware of its own technical limitations. Instead of an attempt at realism we are presented with a kind of comic 3D. This contrasts markedly with the much more sophisticated 3D animation seen in All Saints Ballet (2002). Dollar X (1993) presents a consumerist media critique of fashion magazines with digital compositing techniques, and Animal (1993) explores the possibilities of morphing - eyes morph into teeth, Ellard morphs into a chicken.
A large proportion of the Severed Heads video work in the nineties was produced for live performance: multiple versions of clips, extended mixes, video wallpaper backgrounds, etc. The tenth version of Dead Eyes Opened, however, was made primarily for broadcast television when the song hit the top twenty.
It is more of an anti-music video with black and white alternate frames and grungy images. It's more or less a challenge to the broadcasters "I'm so bored with this song by now - I dare you to play this." They didn't.
Severed Heads -petrol
Severed Heads - All saints ballet
Severed Heads - All saints ballet
Severed Heads - Bless this house
Severed Heads - Hot with fleas
Severed Heads -petrol
Severed Heads - All saints ballet
Severed Heads - All saints ballet