Filmic - "Peacock People: Lectures Laid By Borrowed Branch"

Filmic - Nostromo (Self-released 2007)

Filmic - Peacock People: Lectures Laid By Borrowed Branch / Self-released

Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of motion pictures. A dialogue of sound and image. The intention to create a unique form of sample-based music that extends past traditional stylistic associations. There seem to be a strangely prominent number of New Zealand duos out there right now (Flight of the Conchords and Over the Atlantic are just two examples that spring to this mind), but the definitions that are the foundations of this review can only be attributed to Filmic.

Peacock People: Lectures Laid By Borrowed Branch. Sounds pretentious, doesn't it? Like a grad student thesis or a teenaged post-rock album. But Gareth Fletcher and Richard Sewell knew what they were doing when they put this 16-track, 52-minute experiment to tape. It's been a long time coming: Fletcher used to spin shiny black stuff under the alias of DJ Glyd, going so far as to place in a Heineken-sponsored DJ competition in 2003. As a graduate at Canterbury University in Christchurch, Fletcher made the film "Part and Parcel" which you can check out on both the webpage and the MySpace. Sewell is the classic doppelgänger, slightly less visible but no less important. As a DJ himself for eight years, Sewell has used his classical violin and piano training to get through school to architecture in Wellington, but the constructions and the definitions of composition are what unite the two.

That's where this album comes in. Someday they hope to have Filmic working as a proper collective, but in the meanwhile it's only their own vast knowledge they have to work with. Maybe they won't need the rest after all: If it's not the lush orchestration of "The Effect of Sunlight on Paint," it's 80s cop dramas scored on "Jimmy's Saloon." If it's not the evil kid's cartoon of "Gjinko," it's the jazzy minimalism of "Tumbledown." If it's not the chase scene from a late-70s kung fu movie in "Nostromo," it's the hermetically sealed sounds of "Beyond 2000" on "Gear Shift." The samples are chosen carefully. The 33s and 45s sampled, smeared and restructured for this album are omnipresent. I always wondered how to invade Russia in the winter successfully, and while it doesn't provide any answers, "How to Invade Russia in Winter" provides the backdrop to that brainstorming session. Tense and fraught with concern.

The point is that one song just isn't enough to hear to get an idea of what this album is like. It is everywhere at once, and like its ceaselessly inventive creators, it has the endless opportunity for growth. Somewhere in North America right now, Gareth Fletcher is trekking the continent and collecting the sights, smells and sounds that will ultimately feed the next Filmic album. If it's anything like this, we may be in for a surprise. Can two New Zealanders know America better than it knows itself? Peacock People: Lectures Laid By Borrowed Branch may not hold the answers, but the cards are being played awfully close to the chest.