Review: Nordic Giants

Review: Nordic Giants

By Chris Bucklow

Internationally renowned artist Chris Bucklow reviews the Nordic Giants at the Shepton Mallet Digital Arts Festival, 8th October 2011

The story of how we went….

I wanted to pick my friend Tristan’s brains on some Powerpoint presentation I was putting together, so I dropped in to see him at his work.

As I left he mentioned he was going to a gig by the Nordic Giants, and did I want to come? He hadn’t seen them live.

I knew he was supposed to be doing some animation work for the band, and he’d lent us a their first EP, though as usual, I hadn’t had time to play the CD. But my wife Susan had listened to it and she’d liked it. So I thought this was a good opportunity to take her out.

As is the way with many life-changing things, looking back, it was all so casual, and things might have been different: Tristan might never have mentioned the gig, or I might have said I we were going to have a quiet night in with Love Film - as Sue had already suggested earlier in the day.

But as it turned out, I thought it might be something she’d like; some excitement - so we went to the gig. It was an experience I will never forget.

***

In the mid 1970s, when the sculptor Donald Judd reviewed a Paul Klee exhibition in New York he was so stunned that he was lost for words. All he could manage was: “I went to the Paul Klee show. It was perfect.” A two line review for a blockbuster show at MoMA… plus he was writing in a fancy intellectual art magazine where the reviews were usually verbose and erudite. He must have had a lot of trouble getting this one past the Editor.

Obviously Judd was blown away. That’s how it also was last night after the Nordic Giants played. What we had just experienced was too profound for words. We three just looked at each other in silent amazement.

For sure, we had clapped and shouted and congratulated the band, but there was no way of telling what we had actually witnessed right there before our very eyes. Something massive. Something immense that will live on with me, as a measure of just what can be made with skill and high ambition: High art as profound as any made across all media, be it the novel, or cinema, or poetry, painting or music in any of its genres - classical, or indie, or rock.

***

Two guys came on stage – though there was no stage – they were just at the front of the room we shared. Both of them wore dark carnivalesque bird masks and costumes; one was also painted like a warrior.

He played bowed guitar and then drums. The other musician played trumpet and keyboards. A third member of the band was a large projected video screen on which they screened a succession of short films. This was like the era of the silent cinema, where a pianist or orchestra accompanied the visual presentation.

The film-festival crowd were departing, there were few of us left. Surreal images began to roll on the screen, as beautiful, frantic, desperate, soaring music smashed into my mind.

As the birdman-warrior drummer/guitarist battered his drums I was not there in the room of scattered souls, I was at the forge with Blake’s blacksmith artist Los, his hero traveler through the mental worlds of Golgonooza. I felt exuberant, tearful, cosmic.

A volcano came erupting through the floor. I knew not where to look, for the screen images were wonderful and the stories there unfolding, so beguiling. But the players were more magnetic. They played with massive energy; crescendos of piercing trumpet, then falling away into sweet, sad guitar before building yet again into structures of thrashing energy, on and on and on.

When I remembered to think - to pinch myself that I was really hearing and seeing this – for me, as a painter, there was also a little despair. How could one hope to make something so powerful, so penetrating of the soul, with simple paint and brushes?

We had just seen the unleashing a total work of art; powerful new music and visuals; hallucinatory costume and performance. I felt that I might as well pack up now, put down my brushes, with the knowledge that one is working in a lesser medium.

I can recall only one occasion when I had felt something similar. And it was a long time ago. All the experiences in between had been lesser. The occasion was a night in July 2003 when I had first heard the Mars Volta play ‘De-Loused in the Comatorium’.

Here in Shepton Mallet we had just experienced the brilliant orchestration of musical light and shade that Omar Rodriguez Lopez structured that Volta album with.

In my own medium of visual art Matthew Barney is the only one who approaches the sublime nature of Rodriguez Lopez’s work, though Barney is more cerebral and much less exhilarating. The same scale of ambition is there in the Nordic Giants, the same seemingly effortless attention to the brilliant details of so many aspects of the work, woven successfully together into the rich ‘operatic’ fabric of an epic creation.