Review: GoGo Penguin – Koyaanisqatsi (live soundtrack)

You had to give them full marks for chutzpa even before they began. In making a new soundtrack score for 80s cult film Koyaanisqatsi GoGo Penguin were setting themselves up against original composer Philip Glass (whose insistent repetitions are clearly a big influence on their own music) as well as committing to playing for an unbroken 90 minutes. On the plus side, they knew there would be a dazzling visual element, the film itself being an astonishingly conceived and realised forerunner to the kind of high definition imagery we now take for granted. The rare opportunity to see it again on a big screen was in itself a huge draw to older audience members, and this was to be only the second live outing for the new music.

Gogo Penguin in daylight

Glass’ original score was a typically rich electronic wash of lightning arpeggios against meticulously plodding riffs with occasional sweeps of choral vocals. GoGo Penguin took on their task with their straightforward piano trio set-up, albeit that Rob Turner had augmented his drum kit with a massive extra bass drum and large gong, and by eschewing the opportunity to intone the film’s title as it appeared in the darkness it was clear they weren’t planning on adding vocals. They opened instead with a stentorian piano phrase from Chris Illingworth underpinned with gently rumbling drums as an old factory building crumpled to pieces on screen. They continued eking out the music until the film took off into gloriously slow images of astonishing landscapes and vistas of boiling clouds, the score catching the grandeur with bowed bass and thrumming gong. Then a stormy sea gave Turner the chance to explode more freely on drums.

Bass player Nick Blacka had to bide his time, however, mainly bowing or waiting, until the film moved on to industrial landscapes and he was unleashed against seething drums and a looser piano sound into a cross-rhythmic  burst that was very un-Glass, very GoGo Penguin. He shifted to bass guitar soon after and a recognisable funk groove emerged as images of weaponry and explosions filled the screen.

Seething urbanism, Koyaanisqatsi style

And so it went, the music mostly matching the visuals and, if not as painstakingly synched in as Philip Glass achieved, it was certainly in harmony with the rhythms of the imagery. Some moments were exceptional – the tragic grandeur of an aborted space launch that explodes, the camera holding the slowly rotating descent of a burning fragment for what seems an eternity as Chris Illingworth stretched an increasingly sparse piano line or the exhilarating fluidity of a modal musical rollercoaster accompanying speeded-up urban traffic. When the film finally focuses on human faces, each somehow damaged and lost, the quiet simplicity of the playing was equally evocative. There were moments that closely echoed the (echoing) original itself, others that recalled the more plangent side of EST (another big influence) but, impressively, there were few moments that felt like something stretched too far. A lot of the interest factor lay in the percussion, at times almost providing the melodic element through tuned bowls and patterns that caught the piano notes, but the sound was so holistic it would be invidious to celebrate the elements too much.

Watching the film itself – an argument that the frantic pace of consumerism, mass production working and modern warfare is a ‘life out of balance’ with the dignity and pace of natural processes – it was ironic that this previously obsolete vision of industrial America, complete with its choking fumes and military overkill, was very much what the new president has promised to restore.