CHUMLUM @ Black Sun

And when we rend the veil
With the veil-ending wail
There exists unbound
Disintegrating into sound
Into light and sound
Hear them sing 

The penultimate Black Sun event is coming up on May 4th at the Triskel, Cork, and it's going to be a very special one. I doubt anyone who was fortunate enough to be present when Daniel Higgs played at Black Sun a couple of years back has forgotten that extraordinary experience. Well... he's back!

And so are Woven Skull, a band I always truly love to hear.

And the films...

In Deference to the Squeamish I (Willie Stewart, 2013)

This haunting track from Divil A’ Bit’s upcoming album is graced with an exceptionally lyrical and eerily delicate music video that entices viewers into a discreetly experimental woodland reverie. Music by David Colohan, Natalia Beylis and Willie Stewart.

Chumlum (Ron Rice, 1964)

Ron Rice, director of the influential beatnik romp The Flower Thief (1960), has been called “the great tragic figure of the ‘60s underground film scene”. He completed only a handful of films before his death at age 29, but the playfully gorgeous androgynous swoon Chumlum (1964), starring Jack Smith and featuring a score by Angus MacLise (ex-Velvet Underground), remains emblematic of early ‘60s New York experimental filmmaking at its most dizzyingly creative. Shot on breaks between takes on pioneering gay underground icon Smith’s film Normal Love, it captures Smith’s cast in their full ‘Arabian Nights’ regalia decadently draped in hammocks, their bodies layering up and intertwining like the exquisite superimpositions of images Rice employs throughout. Bodies, fabrics, colours, images blend and blur into a hypnotic erotic reverie that encompasses the mind and senses like a delicate but inescapable net of the finest lace. Amongst the ‘flaming creatures’ on display in the cast are Barbara Rubin (director of the sexually graphic experimental classic Christmas on Earth) and Warhol superstar Mario Montez.

“All of yesterday’s parties seem to have exploded in the air… A hallucinatory micro-epic […] and one of the great “heroic doses” of ’60s underground cinema, a movie so sumptuously and serenely psychedelic it appears to have been printed entirely on gauze… Chumlum [manages] to capture with unnerving fidelity the murky glories, the sudden temps morts and temps mutant, not to mention the inevitable malaise of a rich but fading high.”

-Chuck Stephens, Cinema Scope 54

Vicky Langan has posted a couple of absolutely delicious Ron Rice and Jack Smith related links over at the Black Sun Facebook page:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtM4albzpJEQV0ukQZIsdXjllmoBdLVFDFR9H08ZRoufMlbT7War3zSElLirJUjyAjCR5-bm8oMPvwxNCK0tvqynHOWbOAjJ2TnDTbN8VpMk9l6TxAbWsCBzdqxIwyhe7wspwvPw/s1600/riceletter+001.jpg

http://www.blastitude.com/13/ETERNITY/jack_smith.htm

So if you're anywhere near Cork on the 4th, please come along. The clock is now ticking on Black Sun, this extraordinary "Cork institution" (Rachel Warriner) that Vicky unleashed four short years ago and which she has been curating and sustaining ever since...