TARENTEL
Mighty
May 9, 2007

This was as much a film screening – part of the 2007 SF International Film Festival – as it was a live show. The film portion was in honor of the winners of the GreenWorld contest for online video shorts with an environmental theme. The winner and runner-up were screened after Tarentel’s set. According to the GreenWorld organizers, the band was chosen to play at the event because they incorporate video displays into their live show. Having witnessed it myself, I can say that they do so to amazing effect. 

Tarentel’s lush, cinematic soundscapes were perfectly accompanied by local filmmaker/artist Paul Clipson’s improvised Super 8mm films. As shots of tree-lines and city skylines silhouetted in front of the rising or setting sun flashed across the screen, Tarentel wove dense layers of feedback and noise that were alternately as hopeful as the dawn and as sinister as dusk. Tarentel’s set was heavy on the drone and ambience, and in a very abstract and subtle way it was the perfect accompaniment to Clipson’s film, the highlight of which (for me) was an extreme close-up of a fly holding a dew drop in its front arms and drinking like a little kid shoving his face into a whole watermelon. Much like the band, Clipson seems more interested in texture than structure: there was no narrative to the film, just as there was little progression and few changes in Tarentel’s set.

The dominant themes of the film were all centered around nature: the sun and moisture playing the most prominent parts, especially how those two interplay with the textures of the natural world. For instance, there was a close-up of a snail’s slimy, textured body, and the moisture trail it left behind on the gravelly ground. The oscillations of Tarentel’s oceanic noise riffed off of these same themes brilliantly, as waves of sound rippled and clashed against repetitive, sometimes oddly-timed drum beats.

Tarentel’s music and Clipson’s films worked so well together that they formed an altogether transcendent experience. I like ambient music well enough, but after an hour I start to crave something exciting to keep my interest. Meaning that, had I just been standing there watching these four guys play this music, I might have gotten a little bored. There was no need to watch the guys in Tarentel, however, because of the wholly absorbing film: close-ups of leaves that explored their texture, or leaves covered in dew, or tattered, worn-down leaves through which you could see the sun shining. Every shot formed such an appropriate backdrop to the music that it was as if both art forms were merging into something totally new.