Yes, indeed — this is a live King Crimson thing from 1982. And I feel like I may have seen it before? The eight minute long version of Waiting Man seems familiar.

But what the hey — I can watch it again while cleaning the balcony.

Bill Bruford really wants to be at the front of the stage for this movie. But that’s a nice instrument.

And then we get a fifteen minute version of Sheltering Sky? Man, the people in Frejus are patient.

Yes! This is exactly what the people in Frejus needed right now! A five minute drum solo!

Obvs, if you’re not a fan of King Crimson (or King Crimson from this area; most people aren’t), this is gonna be the most boring thing ever. But for me, this is almost an ideal concert movie: No chatter, no audience shots, no interviews with people saying how great King Crimson is.

It’s just fantastic music filmed sympathetically.

But I’m deducting ⚀ because of the rather crappy VHS-like video quality. (The audio quality is great.)

John Carr is the editor, and no director is listed in the credits, so I’m crediting this to him. Hah!

King Crimson: The Noise. John Carr. 1982. ⚄

I’ve been watching a whole bunch of concert DVDs, and DVDs included in CD box sets with music videos and stuff lately… (And mostly because I started, and once I start doing something, I just continue.)

This isn’t that, really, but a documentary film about Joëlle Léandre.

So far, it’s my Platonic ideal of a music documentary — we get quite substantial takes from a variety of concerts, and then inbetween we get Léandre talking to the camera about music. And that’s it. No talking heads dropping in with a sentence, no zooming on still photos, no voice overs. I.e., nothing annoying.

OK, we also get shots of Léandre shopping and talking to fans and stuff, but that’s not annoying.

I like the er cinematography here, too — I think it’s just a single camera in every shot? Which makes things quite like being present at a concert, because you can only watch one thing at at time — you can turn your head, just like the camera can pivot, but there’s no… editing.

I would have appreciated if they could, like, pop up some text to say who Léandre is playing with…

The performances are lovely.

As the movie progresses, there’s less talking and more music… which is nice (because the music is enjoyable), but it also feels a bit lopsided?

Léandre was talking about not playing a lot with French musicians… and then this guy was talking about how he had very few gigs in the US (where he’s from)… so is everybody playing in, like, The Netherlands?

It’s a documentary that’s very vague on locations and names.

This comes in a nice cardboard cover…

… and a substantial booklet of paintings by Léandre.

I liked this a lot. If you’re not a fan of Léandre’s music, I suspect it’ll be somewhat of a slog to get through — it’s almost two and a half hours long, and I guess about four fifths of the movie is live (improvised) performances.

So not for everybody, but:

Basse Continue. Christine Baudillon. 2008. ⚄

This is a movie so obscure that nobody’s even bothered to make an IMDB entry for it? It looks pretty elaborate, and discogs has the data. So it was released on a VHS? And it’s the music of Tuxedomoon, of course.

I got this from a Tuxedomoon extras DVD.

I’ve got a gazillion Tuxedomoon albums (I’ve got 43 of the 9 albums they released), but I don’t think the soundtrack to this movie has ever been released in this form? Most of the songs have, but there’s different mixes/versions and atmospherics…

I guess it’s kinda like a long-form music video — it doesn’t seem to be narrative, and it seems tied to each song.

How much you’re going to enjoy this movie depends on how much you like Tuxedomoon’s music and how drunk you are. I’m scoring 11 on both, so I’m giving this:

The Ghost Sonata. Bruce Geduldig / Winston Tong. 1982. ⚄