Tokyo noise – a divided audience in Shoreditch.
Tonight’s film, at the Rich Mix in East London, was certainly provocative.
We Don’t Care About Music Anyway is a weird, beautiful, interesting and LOUD film documenting a movement of young people in Japan who are ‘fighting against the social norms’ and trying to express themselves through the language of noise.
Their ‘instruments’ are the everyday sounds of the city; bits of junk, their own bodies, broken record players, electrical static. They take sanders to cellos, causing orange sparks to fly hypnotically into the audience, and continue until the screeching sound becomes too overwhelming. They record traffic, electronic frequencies, rubbish trucks crunching metal, anything that buzzes, hums or shrieks unpleasantly is moulded into a explosive cacophony of noise.
“Japan has a poor notion of happiness,” one ‘musician’ explains, “it is ‘happiness in a box’- as if you can buy it in a shop”.
This is what advocates of this burgeoning underground scene are railing against; the control, uniformity and restriction they feel has come to define modern day Japan.
The images of Tokyo certainly are reminiscent of Blade Runner, in contrast the musical interludes were shattering, bizarre and at times quite horrifically unpleasant on the eardrums, but somehow fascinating and beautiful in their truthfulness.
“We are trying to take our surroundings, and make something new out of them…to deny Modernism, while living in modernity”.
I found the film to be highly thought-provoking and original, and much of the audience seemed to agree with me, “I feel a bit like my ears have been assaulted, but in a good way” one man, grinning, tells me after the film finishes.
However, about one third of the audience seemed to disagree, and left during the screening. “That was horrible, so loud! Awful music, didn’t like it at all” I overheard one girl say to her friend as they left.
We Don’t Care about Music Anyway is definitely a bizarre, fascinating, unique, horrific and funny film that is about as far away from mainstream cinema as you can get, much too far, it seems, for some.
