

As much as we diss Warp for making bad decisions, they have perfected the right techniques that make them a strong label with a strong identity. Most importantly: present the music in a direct and uncluttered way, with a conscious attention to an appealing design, making sure it is never overpowering: essentially allowing for the music to retain its importance over design. It's essentially what they've done for their first various artist video collection. Warp Vision isn't breaking new grounds nor is it the first of its kind (see: Ninja Tune or Matador), but what it does is collect a wide selection of the music videos that Warp has had something to do with over the years. It has no noticeable Easter Eggs, nor any audio commentary. The menu choices are to play all the videos or select them alphabetically, see the credits and see some images. Noticably absent are videos for Autechre's "Basscadet," Tricky Disco's "Tricky Disco" and "Housefly," anything from Vincent Gallo (THANK GOD), as well as !!! and Tortoise (but then again, they were licensed from US labels so Warp probably doesn't even own the rights to the videos). What is included are everybody's favorite Aphex videos with people running around with his ugly ass face on, Chris Cunningham's brilliant video for Squarepusher's "Come On My Selector" and the Chris Cunningham-wanna be, LFO's "Freak" directed by Daniel Levi (gotta love those fiery young Asian girls), plus videos from Prefuse, Antipop, the inexcusable Jimi Tenor, and many more. I'm pleased to finally be able to see videos for Sweet Exorcist (even if it's a lot of primitive graphics and a Pong! game) and LFO's classic "LFO" and the brilliant "Tied Up." Videos like Broadcast's "Papercuts" are just so visually colorful that it reminds me how much nicer it is to see on a full screen as opposed to a tiny little streaming computer image. A couple Warp TV commercials are included for shits and giggles along with a bonus CD of eleven audio mosaics of various tunes from the Warp vaults mixed by Buddy Pearce and Zilla. The CD is forgettable for the most part, but the DVD has its moments that will please different people depending on their tastes. With any luck 4AD and Mute will take a hint and do something similar. (And if you record execs are actually reading: don't leave anything out next time!)

Although she is best known for her successful career in films, Brigitte Bardot also had a prolific recording output during the 1960s which carried over into the beginning of the '70s. Thanks to a new DVD compiling all her musical performances for French television, a new generation of fans all over the globe can get a taste of how these two media combined made B.B. the most beloved pop icons in French history.



This is the third DVD released on Alan Bishop's Sublime Frequencies imprint, and it offers a rare glimpse at the traditional music and ceremonies of the Tuareg people of Libya. The Tuareg are an ancient desert-dwelling people who have never been subsumed into the Arab/Muslim majority of the rest of the Middle East.



Warner Brothers' edition marks the first appearance of the film on DVD, and it is a mixed affair. The transfer is presented in anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio of 1.85:1, which is generally quite clean, although occasionally fuzzy. The sound as well is not particularly dynamic, but this is likely a result of a film of its age. The extras include a music-only audio track, two theatrical trailers and a disappointingly useless commentary track by Antonioni scholar Peter Brunette. Perhaps the nicest extra is the use of the original artwork on the cover of the case.
Although it's often dismissed as pretentious, Blow-Up, which definitely suceeds in being cryptic, is an excellent film. It will likely never appeal to viewers in search of a film with a concrete plot, straightforward dialogue or an ending that neatly ties everything together. It is highly recommended viewing for anyone in search of an escape from the mindless drivel that typically fills the multiplexes in the first few months of the year.




Although Daughters of Darkness is slowly paced, it avoids being tedious. Thanks to its beautiful photography of the posh resort and its eerie Bruges surroundings, superior performances by the cast (particularly Seyrig who nearly floats through most of her scenes in a series of breathtaking outfits), and a penetrating and haunting overall atmosphere, this film is far better than it could have been in less capable hands. Jean Ferry, a surrealist affiliate who penned a number of significant French films, co-wrote the screenplay, which is rife with often incomprehensible situations and stiff dialogue. Daughters is indeed part campy kitsch-fest, but director Kuemel appears to accept this as part and parcel of making an extremely low-budget film. However, it's certainly to look past the film's faults to discover its true dreamlike genius.
Previously available on DVD in a mostly bare-bones edition, the fab folks at Blue Underground have re-released Daughters of Darkness as a Director's cut edition and with a widescreen transfer. It includes some killer extras to top the whole thing off, including two separate commentary tracks (one with Harry Kuemel and the other with John Karlen), and a charming interview with actress Andrea Rau, who plays Ilona.
Mondo Macabro, as its name suggests, is devoted to releasing onto DVD long-forgotten horror films from around the world. Their most recent unearthing is Seven Women for Satan (aka Les Weekends Malefiques du Comte Zaroff), made in France in 1974. Starring and directed by Michel Lemoine, it recounts the tale of a Parisian businessman, Count Zaroff, who retreats to his chateau for murder and debauchery on the weekends. He is reluctantly assisted in these pursuits by his servant, played by Howard Vernon (a regular in Jess Franco films throughout the 1970s).
Mute/Spoon
I've been listening to Can records for years without any kind of visual
counterpart other than the one created in my fertile imagination. Other
than the few photographs on the inner sleeve of the Tago Mago
LP, I had no idea what the band really looked like, or what their stage
presence would be, what kind of clothes they wore, or how they behaved
in interviews. In part, it was this total lack of a visual context that
made their music all the more mysterious and addictive to me. I
imagined a group of hairy future primitives; shamanic heads full of
acid and tightly wound sagacity, like Gandalf crossed with The Beatles
crossed with those aliens from Fantastic Planet.
When Mute/Spoon announced the release of Can DVD, featuring hours of live and documentary footage of the band across two DVDs, I was excited, but apprehensive. Any video image of the group was bound to pale in comparison to the elaborate image I had extrapolated while listening to their explosive records. I was right to be apprehensive. While it is truly wonderful to finally be able to view and own rarities like the 1972 film Can Free Concert and the early performances excerpted on Can Documentary, the rest of this DVD is frightening and pointless. Can Notes is an overlong documentary assembled by Wim Wenders collaborator Peter Przygodda from years of random video footage. There is a heavy emphasis on the period leading up to and following the release of the Sacrilege remix album. Holger Czukay, Irmin Schmidt, Jaki Liebezeit and Michael Karoli are paraded out, well past their prime, to answer a bunch of submental Actor's Studio-style questions, which elicits exasperating, embarrassing results. Why would you sit down with a genius like Holger Czukay and ask him to name his least favorite word? It ends up playing like a low-rent Where Are They Now? on Can, but with the noticeable absence of any material on vocalists Damo Suzuki and Malcolm Mooney, both of whom are alive and well, and continue to make music.
There are four Dolby 5.1 remixes of songs from the Can catalog, which on the surface seemed like an interesting idea, until I realized that the tracks chosen are all drawn from average-to-terrible latter-day albums Flow Motion, Landed and Rite Time. The multi-dimensional retuning adds nothing to this lackluster material. I should add that Can DVD also comes with an audio CD of material by the core members' post-Can projects. While it's all nice enough, it seems strange that this is packaged with something called Can DVD. Can Notes is also stuffed full of footage and material from these later solo outings. It's almost as if I'm being force-fed this stuff. As interesting as one might find the music of Clubs Off Chaos or Irmin Schmidt's Gormenghast opera, one would need to employ heavy historical revisionism to consider this later work to be nearly as significant as the groundbreaking work of Can. Brian Eno contributes an amusing one-minute video which manages to be completely self-aggrandizing even as it purports to pay tribute to his heroes. The disc also includes the presentation of an Echo Lifetime Achievement Award to the band, but strangely, the award is presented to the surviving members of Can by, er, The Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Can Documentary contains many terrific moments - the band performing "Paperhouse" live on German television, a delightfully standoffish interview and excellent promo clips for "Dizzy, Dizzy" and their leftfield disco hit "I Want More." Unfortunately, the film spends a disproportionate amount of time on the ill-advised Rite Time reunion album, and ends with a shamefully piss-poor video for the Westbam remix from Sacrilege. Can Free Concert - made in 1972 by Peter Przygodda - is the DVD's sole moment of pure genius. A 51-minute film combining footage from a 1972 concert in Cologne with candid material of Can composing tracks for Tago Mago inside their Inner Space studio, Can Free Concert displays the full explosive range of the improvisational chemistry between the five band members. The director uses disorienting parallel editing to emphasize the primitive, primal and shamanic qualities of Can's avant-neanderthal noise. It's a pure delight to see Damo Suzuki wearing a red-and-pink velvet jumpsuit, furiously shaking his black mane in time to Jaki Liebezeit's tribal trance drumming. Later, in the studio, Damo works out the vocals for "Bring Me Coffee or Tea" with quiet intensity, and I finally experience the perfect visual equivalent to Can's incomparable magic.
Mute/Spoon should have placed this and the Can Documentary
onto a single DVD and retailed it for the price of a CD. Instead, we
have this overstuffed, prohibitively priced package full of pointless
junk, with a little bit of genius thrown in for color.


The DVD release contains some nice extras, including "behind the scenes" documentary footage shot during the Circle tour, a somewhat muddled-through commentary track by Eddie, and a performance from the Dress to Kill tour in French (including English subtitles). All in all, it's a great package, and a good prelude to Izzard's upcoming world tour this fall.

For the last 40 years of consensus space-time, the entity known as Robert Anton Wilson - author, philosopher, neuroscientist, psychedelic comedian, mystic, shaman and Pope - has been tirelessly exploring the tantalizing, puzzling, enigmatic, bizarre, mind-bending and funny metaphysical mysteries of human existence. Now comes Maybe Logic, a definitive documentary about Pope Bob, in the form of an independently released two-DVD set from Deepleaf Productions.
In 1977, Robert Anton Wilson published Cosmic Trigger, an unparalleled epic adventure of deliberately induced brain change, interstellar revelations and mystical initiation. Cosmic Trigger uniquely accounted Wilson's mind-expanding voyage from an atheist, ex-Catholic skeptic to a Buddhist, a Sufi, a Gnostic, a Witch, a Thelemic Magician and a Discordian Pope. Interwoven into this singularly electrifying narrative were ruminations on the Illuminati, synchronicity, conspiracy theory, Finnegan's Wake, Timothy Leary's eight-circuit model of human consciousness, Aleister Crowley, quantum physics and transactional psychology. Robert Anton Wilson had tapped into a current of thought about the universe that has existed since the dawn of man, and was able to make a linkage between all of the various "solutions" to the impossibly enigmatic nature of the universe - scientific theories, philosophies, religious dogmas and cult doctrines - and in the process, he mapped the interior of our belief-derived reality tunnels. While there are dozens of other futurists, mystics and new-age philosophers who have written about such ideas, no one could ever match the engaging humor, the inherent rationalism and the contagious adventurousness of Robert Anton Wilson's more than 30 books, plays and novels. Pope Bob's unique convergence of ideas has served as the basis for the Church of the Subgenius, The Temple of Psychick Youth and the current of occultism known as Chaos Magick.
The main attraction of this DVD set is the one-and-a-half hour video documentary Maybe Logic. This documentary is obviously a labor of love, combining old footage with abundant new interviews with Wilson himself, as well as a host of colleagues, admirers and disciples. We see Pope Bob as an old man - an eccentrically cherubic, white-bearded cross between Confucius, Siddhartha and Mr. Natural. Sadly, he is in the advanced stages of post-polio syndrome, and is confined to a wheelchair, in acute pain for most of his waking hours. Always a libertarian thinker, his recent illness has led him to become an ardent supporter of medicinal marijuana, which he claims is the only analgesic for his constant, intense pain. But despite these tragedies, one cannot help but be impressed by Robert Anton Wilson's unshakable optimism, his creativity, and his unending inquisitiveness. These interviews are edited together with aplomb, the director using a myriad of cutting-edge, mind-bending digital video effects to further intensify the cosmic revelations in Wilson's monologues. The soundtrack is equally superb, with suitably thought-provoking contributions from Boards of Canada, Matt Elliott, The Cinematic Orchestra, Tarantel, Funki Porcini and Amon Tobin.
The second DVD includes supplemental interviews and lectures about various subjects, from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake to the allegorical BBC television series The Prisoner, as well as some exercises designed to awaken your own internal neurological warrior. If you were hazy about quantum physics, mysticism, magick, conspiracy theories and existentialism before, watching this DVD could truly trigger a Kundalini-like awakening of your dormant consciousness. As a bonus, the simple act of watching this DVD will officially ordain you, the viewer as a Discordian Pope. Wilson's final message is that the universe is "plural and mutable" - a vast, un-simultaneously comprehended confluence of subjectively created belief systems and reality tunnels. If you can properly understand Pope Bob's universe, there can be no room for intolerance or misunderstanding, only a constantly renewed sense of vigour, optimism and adventure in discovering the staggering creative potential of the human nervous system.