Filmic is an audiovisual collaboration of two comprised of New Zealand-based duo Gareth Fletcher and Richard Sewell. Over the last nine years, Fletcher has maintained a steady presence amongst the NZ electronic music scene, producing and DJing as DJ Glyd, whilst also hosting a long-running “esoteric’ electronic music show on Christchurch’s independent RDU radio station until earlier this year. Alongside these music-based ventures, Fletcher has also spent the past several years exploring a parallel interest in film production and sound design, undergoing a Fine Arts degree in Film, which led to the beginnings of his Filmic project back in 2001. This debut album as Filmic, Peacock People, shows Fletcher collaborating alongside fellow DJ/producer and violin/piano composition student Sewell for an expansive and ambitious collection that fuses a leftfield instrumental hip-hop backbone with sampled jazz and soundtrack elements to create a sweeping amalgam that sits somewhere between Dabrye’s stripped-back fractured beats and Boom Bip’s wistful soundscapes. The duo are certainly upfront regarding their choices of samples, listing the various source records in the sleeve notes as an extensive list that spans Maurice Jarre’s Doctor Zhivago soundtrack through to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, further engendering the sense of homage that pervades here, rather than simple appropriation.
Opening track “Shadow Basin’ pushes the aforementioned Boom Bip comparisons to the forefront, emerging from tentative treated pianos and vaguely dub-centred vocal samples into a clattering hip-hop informed beatscape that throws plenty of metallic-sounding sampled cymbals and percussion in amongst tumbling vintage record samples before things emerge back out amongst samples of a guy talking about how “He can use the same shipping container anywhere in the world”, in what sounds like a random TV documentary grab. From there, the jangly piano-laden “Nor’Wester’ opts for a stop-start ragtime-meets-hip-hop trajectory that cuts, edits and scatters the rhythms with disorientating effect, before “The Effect Of Sunlight On Paint’s offers respite from the head-spinning edits, ushering forth this collection’s most opulent-sounding moment, as majestic-sounding orchestration floats over skeletal-sounding hip-hop rhythms in a manner that will have some thinking of DJ Krush’s more cinematic outings.
The Eastern European-tinged “High Society’ meanwhile threads vaguely Balkan-sounding sampled instrumentation through a brooding backing of slow, crunching rhythms and tense, one-note synths, the occasional brass instrumental flourish adding a chaotic jazz edge, while “How To Invade Russia In Winter’ offers something of a curveball, melding near-drum’n’bass rhythms with dark buzzing synth riffs and tumbling tabla beats in a moment that sits somewhat oddly amongst the more sample-based material here. While there’s the occasional wander into hackneyed ambient cliche (witness the Terrence McKenna-esque futurist waffle that floats through both “The Constant’s and “Te Reprise’), these slight missteps are easily forgiven amongst a collection this strong. An intriguing debut release from the NZ-based Filmic collective that points towards very interesting things ahead.
Chris Downton
