A passing moment from the novel *Agent Running in the Field*, John le Carré’s latest. It was published late last year. (I’m of the belief that le Carré, now 88 years old, should be in the running for the Nobel Prize in literature: for his gifts to the English language , for the formidable character George Smiley, and for the unmagical realism of his writing.)
I thought I’d seen every Michael Mann movie but I’d never seen *The Jericho Mile* (1979), which he directed even before *Thief* (1981), his first film for theatrical release. *The Jericho Mile* is an ABC TV movie about a prisoner at Folsom with a gift for running. Peter Strauss stars, and the cast includes Richard Lawson, Brian Dennehy, and Geoffrey Lewis, as well as, apparently, numerous actual Folsom residents at the time of the movie’s filming.
This week I finally got around to watching it. *The Jericho Mile* has, already, a lot of the classic Mann themes (later on view in such films as *Heat* and *Collateral*), including the unwritten rules of the criminal underclass, and a view of the subculture from the perspective of a charismatic outlier. It’s not packed with music the way later Mann productions would be. There is, though, great use of a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil”; a looser version with no vocals hits the sweet spot between pop and score. The opening montage is a virtual trial run for *Miami Vice*, everything in sync with the music, even inmates doing jumping jacks.
There were a few other sonic moments worth mentioning:
(1) Midway through, following a riot, there’s a fade-to-white that aligns perfectly with the slowing of the prison’s manual siren.
(2) There’s a minor but unmistakable character in the form of an inmate with a boombox. The role is a bit underdeveloped, but it does allow for diegetic blurring, Mann leaving it unclear at times if what we hear is the score or an emanation from the speakers.
(3) And then there’s the final race, which alternates segments of huffing and puffing with serene silence, the latter presenting the runner’s psychological escape from the prison system, and arguably from the whole of society. This utilization of silence at the end of *The Jericho Mile* is powerful. It gets at the false dichotomy between diegetic (in-narrative) and non-diegetic (off-screen, such as score or voice-over) sound. What the director has prioritized is representing the point of view, the experience, of the character.
I wrote a short study of *Thief*, Mann’s subsequent film, last year for [Hilobrow.com](https://www.hilobrow.com/2019/08/21/convoy-your-enthusiasm-21/), and in the interest of time, I avoided the temptation to revisit other past Mann works. I think I’m going to revisit some more soon, including *Straight Time* and perhaps the Mann film I appreciated the least when I first saw it: *The Last of the Mohicans*.
Each year, my listening seems to get a little closer to the source. This habit, this tendency, goes back to my earliest music explorations. Enamored of a given album in my teens and early 20s, I’d track down music by the individual players on it. In part this pursuit was to expand my horizons, but in part, especially I recognize in retrospect, this was to narrow them; I had the sense that if I gained a comprehension of the individual player’s sound, I’d better understand their contribution to the initial album that seeded my interest.
Fast forward to 2020, and much of my listening is to sketches, to rough drafts, to works-in-progress that people post to SoundCloud and, increasingly, to YouTube of the most inchoate of musical inventions. In the case of [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjv_m370hyw&t=0s), it is Nathan Wheeler documenting his participation in a coding circle. (That’s a social, mutual-improvement scenario adopted online from the classic sewing circle, in which people gather to do solitary creative work in a communal situation. The sewing circle was an influence on the Disquiet Junto, as well.) The circle in which Wheeler is participating originated [on the excellent llllllll.co](https://llllllll.co/t/norns-circle-01-drone-in-three-worlds/) music community. Members were given about a month and a half to write a script for a shared hardware device — the details don’t matter, but if it’s of interest, click through above to llllllll.co and learn more — based on a few guidelines. These amount to a provided set of audio samples, and some broadly defined parameters: volume, brightness, density, “evolve,” and a switching between “worlds” (switching that the accompanying visuals are then intended to represent distinctly). The project is titled “drone in three worlds.”
Understanding those briefest of guidelines is more that sufficient to interpret the video, in which the worlds are depicted as eclipse-like, a receding perspective, and a rapid starfield. If you have more interest, you can read the llllllll.co discussion, and click through to the the GitHub repositories where the source code of the various project responses will be stored. GitHub being where, according to my lifelong trajectory as described above, much of my listening will likely being taking place within a few more years.
When the audio that Japan-based composer Corruption/Corrption uploads regularly to SoundCloud isn’t snippets of [alienated urban field recordings](https://disquiet.com/2020/01/03/japanese-eavesdropping/), it ventures into music, more properly understood. Which isn’t to say the results are any less esoteric, or less enticing. “VUHDRL” is a series of Radiophonic motifs, sound design for a science fiction film that is not only set in deep space, but shot there on location. Which is to say, it isn’t merely alienated; it’s actually alien. Speaker-threatening garbled noise lets through sharp bits of haunting organ, then dissolving amid phaser bursts and an overall sense of otherworldly drama.
Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/corrption](https://soundcloud.com/corrption/vuhdrl).
It’s been almost exactly [a year](https://disquiet.com/2019/02/18/46-seconds-in-heaven/) since I posted one of the brief videos of the artist Zimoun’s tactile, economical, kinetic sculptures, sculptures whose impact — humorous, touching, majestic — is so out of proportion with the modest material from which they are constructed. Here’s a new one, posted today. A short video such as this is how Zimoun announces a newly installed work. Its title, as is generally the case for Zimoun, is little more than a list of the components, here “51 prepared dc-motors, 189 m rope, cardboard sticks 30 cm,” followed by the year of production: “2019.” The footage is a view from the Museum of Contemporary Art MAC, Santiago de Chile. And it’s not even 40 seconds long.
Vimeo, unlike YouTube, doesn’t have an easy way to allow for looped, repeated viewing, but you’ll be drawn in and hitting repeat almost for certain. Watch as the tiny cardboard sticks dance around in circles, suspended like the most rudimentary conception of a marionette. Their balletic footsteps suggest Amazonian rainfall: cardboard drops on a cold concrete floor.
Part of the beauty of Zimoun’s videos is how the sound is and isn’t in sync with what we see. The video cuts from one view to another: a closeup, giving us a sense of the mechanisms, a fuller one to give a sense of scale, a room view for sense of scope. Throughout the cardboard raindrops fall.
Video originally posted at [vimeo.com](https://vimeo.com/388946723). More from Zimoun, who is based in Bern, Switzerland, at [zimoun.net](https://www.zimoun.net/).
