Thursday, November 11, 2010

Werner Nekes









Pretty into Werner Nekes lately, although I see there's a learning curve ahead. Here are some film stills. "Hynningen" and "Makimono," two early-70s meditations on Finnish landscape, are totally captivating. A lot of these films feature music by Anthony Moore. Here's the lovely foresty blissout drone poem from the end of "Makimono."



And here's Moore's trippy guitar interlude from Nekes' "Abbandano" in 1970. The music on this one is the best of the lot -- experimental but quite moving and beautiful. Here's a link to the full score of about 30 minutes or so. Recommended.

5 comments:

  1. Never heard of the guy but these stills intrigue me! Sometimes I wish I could time travel...oh the '70s.

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  2. Werner Nekes also has a famous collection of pre-film optical apparatuses such as magic lanterns, zoetrops, phenakistiscopes and the likes. He also made a film about it called "film before film".
    He has some fascinating pictures of his collection in the german version of his homepage:
    here

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  3. I actually emailed Mr. Moore about the possibility of his film music seeing independent release. However, masters either do not exist or are not in his possession..nice to hear this, though.

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  4. thanks for writing, folks.

    dispo: sounds like a cool collection. a colleague of mine is teaching a class on "dead media" like that.

    matt: rad! nice to see moore is back in the public eye with that ARP collaboration. too bad about the missing masters.

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  5. So I guess your colleague knows Nekes' collection. I think it is one of the most important of its kind with about 30'000 items (!) - unfortunately, he couldn't realise his plans for a museum yet, but parts of it were on display in many exhibitions (there are catalogues):
    http://wernernekes.de/00_cms/cms/front_content.php?idcat=74

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