When ordinary is extraordinary Issue #33

French filmmakers strip bands of the usual hype machine with an au naturale approach

By Sam Scranton
Published: September 1st, 2007 | 12:00am

In June 2006, my band volcano! was in Paris for our European tour. There, we met Chryde Abric and Mathieu Saura, who filmed us for Concerts à Emporter, their video podcast featuring bands playing in nontraditional venues.

We watched the World Cup in a pub among football fanatics and drank pastis in order to build up the courage to perform a spontaneous composition. Neither the bar’s patrons, nor ourselves, were prepared for our avant-garde baroque vocal improvisations.

“My first idea is to break the ‘classic representation’ of music,” Saura says. “I think this idea of having any form of art ‘exposed’ in walls, shown in a special place, is a very 20th-century idea, but we’re in the 21st.”

By removing artists from concert halls to film them in the streets, pubs, forests, and fire escapes, Saura hopes to remove the hierarchy separating musicians from their audiences. Artists including the Shins, Andrew Bird, and Grizzly Bear perform in front of unwitting onlookers. There is the sense that anything can happen — passersby pause to watch, clap along, or completely ignore the spontaneous performance. But these films are not so much performances as documents of genuine interactions between musicians disrobed of hype and celebrity and the chaotic, cluttered, and unpredictable world.

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Visit blogotheque.net/concertaemporter to watch Arcade Fire play in an elevator, Tapes’n’Tapes perform in a bus, and other bands improvise their own songs.