Arthur Lipsett - Arthur Lipsett Soundtracks Label: Global A Records Catalog#: GA 07 Format: Vinyl, 12" Country: Canada Released: Sep 2005 Genre: Non-Music Style: Radioplay, Movie Effects, Audiobook Notes: Licensed from the National Film Board of Canada. Release of four soundtracks created by seminal experimental Canadian filmmaker Arthur Lipsett. The four films were realized in the 60s. Arthur Lipsett first made the sountracks by collage methods and later created film collage to accompany the soundtracks. Tracklisting: A1 21-87 A2 Very Nice, Very Nice B1 A Trip Down Memory Lane B2 Freefall ----------------------------------------------------------------- Arthur Lipsett made an impressive series of collage films during his lifetime. He began his collages under the employment of the National Film Board of Canada. During a sound workshop, he was given the assignment to tell a story by editing together found sound materials. Lipsett took the assignment further by editing images to the sound collage he created. The result was to become Very Nice Very Nice, sharing his view of the phantasmagoria of a world he saw around him. This first effort earned him an Academy Award nomination at the age of 25. Arthur Lipsett, Soundtracks is a document that celebrates the work of Arthur Lipsett, while highlighting his sound collage as an art form in itself. The National Film Board of Canada granted the license to create this sound document from the original film masters. Mostly from the 1960s, emerging from the Beats, his films are dense cut-ups to do with themes like science and spirituality, religious mania and Cold War paranoia, Apocalypse and nuclear melt-down, consumerism and nothingness, rituals and machines, all that good stuff. The films started out as the sound collages finely presented here — tightly compacted clips of spoken word (Marshall MacLuhan, religious loons, Newsreel announcers, TV scientists, bullshit politicians), in with noise (factories, helicopters, bombs) and music (jazz, gospel, parade-ground, church) — sometimes manipulated, often highly rhythmic, stlll so captivating and chilling. Although Lipsett (who committed suicide in 1986) has been categorised as a “found foutage” filmmaker, the vision of his work is pretty much based on the juxtaposition of (found) sound and image (”I cannot tell whether I am seeing or hearing – I feel taste, and smell sound – it’s all one – I myself am the tone.”, he wrote). In his collages, in which he evokes his “complex, tragic-comic view of the world” (William C. Wees), sound becomes a subversive agent of the image, allowing a critical reflection on what is being shown. This juxtapostion creates after-images which carry over as sonic bridges to other sequences. The importance of the sound, as instructions for observing and critiquing the images, is highlighted by this LP, which illustrates Lipsett’s highly structured system of field recordings, loops, speech and music. It proves all the more that Lipsett was really a postmodern bricoleur avant la lettre, rearranging the debris of the cultural past. (fragments are available here. The LP is published by Global A, the label owned by archivist Johannes Auvinen, better known - for those into Acid/House - as Tin man) btw: The Lipsett film '21-87' was referenced several time in George Lucas’ ‘Star Wars’ films (also in ‘THX 1138:4EB’ and ‘THX 1138′). (For freaks only: Princess Leia’s cell aboard the Death Star is number 2187. THX 1138 took place in the year 2187, and Maggie McOmie’s character in it dies on the coded date “21/87.” Also, as the legend goes, one of the sound samples in Lipsett’s film, a conversation between Warren S. McCulloch, a pioneer of artificial intelligence, and Roman Kroitor, a cinematographer and director who helped develop the IMAX film format (”Many people feel that in the contemplation of nature and in communication with other living things, they become aware of some kind of force, or something, behind this apparent mask which we see in front of us…”) helped shape Lucas’ ideas about ‘The Force’. How about that, huh). Stanley Kubrick was also a big fan, and asked him to make the trailer of ‘Dr. Strangelove’. Lipsett declined, but his influence is clearly visible in Pablo Ferro’s brilliant trailer.