Sound For The Future by Matt Hulse
“Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only”
Five minutes into Sound For the Future the director Matt Hulse describes going to the local library (secular churches) to begin “writing and planning and scheduling” in order to release himself from a “simmering rage against a culture that places the written word above all”. Writing this review of a post-punk memoir movie, I feel his pain. The film seems to voyage towards an acceptance made possible by embodied understanding. When I was ten, I can recall the sumptuous sapphire blue carpet in the living room of my best friend Peter’s sizeable detached Edwardian house, as we hunkered down on the floor by the family’s music-centre to play monopoly with his siblings and grandma. Music-centres with record-deck, cassette-player and radio, were one of the ways the chaos-magik of punk entered into domesticity in the late nineteen seventies. Peter’s older brother was in charge of the music and chose Bring on the Nubiles by the Stranglers. Grandma had her back to the impressive music-centre and behind her Sean was gurning along to the “lemme lemme lemme fuck yer fuck yerz” as he turned the volume up LOUD. Sound for the Future immersed me back in this cross generational maelstrom of guilt, creation, love and rebellion. “It feels manipulative” says the music psychologist to the director. Although it did critique, Punk was never meant to be a satire but an explosive affirmation. An ejaculation, a coming together, a wet gushing orgasm of creative will-to-power. It’s hard to find punk under the detritus of identities and badges because really it happened in a multiplicity of shapes and forms including what it means to be in a family with parents and siblings in a house with a mortgage and to aspire to live freely. Sound for the Future never sets out to give us answers but Ruth Pendragon, the director Matt’s mum gentle hints at how we could be free to love despite freedom habitually being defined by the structures of co-dependency. SFTF is precariously close to being painfully messy and this is because it (the film) knows that being manipulative (three act structure) will not allow truth to emerge. The film’s plethora of rituals, incantations, spoonerisms, ventriloquisms and invocations created within family events, public gatherings and auditions feel like a mutant super-cultivation and subsequent hacking through of the undergrowth of post-rationalised reason out onto to somewhere close to a sublime of the material present. Spoiler alert. In short during SFTF Matt Hulse sells the family cow, plants the magic beans and after dicing with death cuts down the giant triffid of ersatz otherness, leaving us to muse within the tranquil buzz of the possibility of actual change. Matt Hulse’s directorial skill with parallel editing (mastered in collaboration with Nick Currey) and performative sense of material vitality mean that this seems to happen all at once, like beholding a giant fading tapestry behind the altar at the Church of St. Malcolm of McLaren.At the start of SFTF Hulse shares his aim of not seeking to make a film about “it” but to “be it”. This is about being in the milieu or the middle of things. When we make something about something we have to be outside it. Matt is the middle child so he knows this.
I recently reviewed Looking for a Kiss, Richard Cabut’s positive punk, gorgeous quasi-autobiographical novel set in early eighty’s Camden. In the book there is a passage of reflection upon a photograph of the punk couple at the heart of the story,
He saw himself in the future looking at a photograph taken in the past of two young people, Robert and Marlene, grinning hard into a bright new tomorrow.
The writer reflects upon how the photographic image somehow replaces the feeling of experience and creative emergence. I wanted to draw out the affirmative vitality Cabut had broadcast in his seminal NME article on positive punk. There was a sense that the book was a way of grieving how a lived expression of a creative experience became reduced to a symbol: Positive Punk equals Goth.
Robert looked at the picture, taken long ago, and thought: images can lie in many ways, maybe through manipulation or perspective. And, sometimes, over the course of time, he mused, the truth simply seeps out of a photograph like fine-grained sand from between two cupped palms.
Hulse’s hand playfully grasping at air out of the car window
The insertion of a hand, sans puppet, playfully grasping at thin air out of a moving car window in SFTF is another way of describing the futility of trying to define moving experience through cognitive reason alone. The fulcrum for Sound for the Future is the photograph of The Hippies, which along with the cassette tape itself defines the fictioned-reality of the band. That photo alone is enough to make The Hippies a band. It’s a family snap shot and reframes family reunion as a reforming of the band. This moves us away from all the assumptions about what being a family means and allows a more open exploration of what a family is or might be. Hulse is a serious and intensely creative film-maker and this relationship between the image (the object) and the animated (the actual occasion) is one way of entering the film’s assemblage brain. We think of the animated image as an evolution of the still image when really science-based art turned the animated form to stone and later congratulated itself for ingeniously correcting this stasis. We might still be encountering images as a form of enlivening were it not for what Prof. Tony Sampson describes as a “fictitious linear historical trajectory of the image; a trajectory in which instants have become erroneously privileged over the movement of images”. Like a woman repeatedly spraying pigment through an animal bone, around her hand on a cave wall Hulse’s film project takes the somewhat perilous route of attempting to enfold the process of creating into the outcome. Critics and/or anthropologists will then ask but what is your message? There is a scene where Matt’s mum is on hand as the young actors are transformed through make-up and costume, into her children from the photograph. “It’s all about the hair” Matt tells me later and he has a point. Surely this is a unique moment in cinematic history? Ruth seems to be the right mother to undergo this experience because, as the film reveals, she feels, I think, that freedom to love comes from freedom from the laws of identity. I mean identity as dialectical opposition rather than affirmation. Autopoesis doesn’t define by opposition but creative entanglement. Positive Punk.
By bringing life back to a photo Sound for the Future is an intriguingly unique means of addressing film as movement image. A way of re-animating the feelings embodied by the players. Whilst watching SFTF I kept thinking of memory as embodied imagination and how we sometimes prefer to call it nostalgia rather than consider that cognition doesn’t know everything. Hulse’s radical nostalgia legitimises the intensity of feeling that emerges when we remember our pre-personal experience of an event. In an article “New Punctums, Proto-Perceptions and Animated Entanglements”, Prof. Sampson discusses how Barthe’s notion of the punctum (here speculatively revisited as Punk-Tomb) as the bruising felt by the viewer of a photo, gravitates back to death and detail because of the privileging effect of the still image. The moving image becomes animated, Sampson says, via the gaps in between and here we find “somatic, temporal registering of experience, occurring outside of cognizant perception”. My encounter with SFTF seemed to be about the director’s personal need to go beyond the codified or linguistic understanding of film, collective memory and indeed personal history in order to re-animate the actual occasion. Punk’s nihilistic qualities are arguably not so much to do with a void of meaning, as they are the emergence of affirmative difference outside a pregiven frame of reference. Through the film’s ritual aesthetic entanglements the hegemonic-self as defined by the laws of identity (the linkedin cv self) is d.e.s.t.r.o.y.e.d. leaving the actual self. That’s an idea. In Sound for the Future we are, perhaps, dealing with how an individual human organism binds self and the world together through perceiving and creative affirmation (autopoiesis).
In an interview with Becky for Kid Vinyl, Matt expressed a strong connection to the phenomenological form of film making more often associated with female directors such as Jane Campion and Agnes Varda. Varda in particular makes sense of how Matt seems to work between the still image and the movement image. Varda made a living taking trivial family photos and went on to make films based on her photographs “asking questions with composition, form and meaning”. Is it possible to prise open how even phenomenological approaches are more frequently encountered via the linguistic order of analysis rather than the affective register? Can a film become non-phenomenological or decentre the anthropocentric order of things? At the risk of being simplistic the masculine (phallocentric) methodology seeks to decode, discover and categorise and therefore makes it quite possible to reduce phenomenological encounter to data processing rather than felt understanding. The visceral thrill of Punk created intensities of feeling through which we could bind our pre-personal selves to the world. The punk concept reshapes the image of thought into something in becoming. By inviting an acausal assemblage of events Hulse uses film-making to reanimate the felt intensities of becoming The Hippies (The name, The Hippies, by the way has to be the best name for a punk band ever because it doesn’t so much shatter representational difference as blow it away like a dandelion head). Professor Sampson’s concept is that the new punctum of “movement image” reveals the affective registers of all movies and how, “ideological tricks or mythologies of the moving image work their magical influence on experience beyond symbolic ideas-in-form”. I confess that like a readily hypnotised audience member, I am more susceptible than some to the magical influence of narrative in film or book. However, through films like Sound for the Future and books such as Looking for a Kiss I have realised with a bit of haptic effort I can experience a more transformational kind of understanding. It’s not always easy but the act of engaging creates a newly imagined form of sense-making. For Prof Sampson this affectual register becomes a means of creating a “non-phenomenological experience of a material relation”.
Later the Kid Vinyl interview, Hulse discusses how his dad became a conduit for the experience of new music and “listening to it, talking about it with more or less undivided attention”. I mention this because it is this linguistic encounter that SFTF seems to be concerned with going beyond or perhaps more appropriately below. Matt’s bricolage approach to film is perhaps about enfolding the conceptual idea into a materially vital assemblage, “If the film could smell like Pritt and Uhu that would be ideal”. A film-maker like Jeff Keen is a useful comparison because he too worked with friends and family on vibrant collaged movies. Keen seemed to work directly with aesthetic pleasure forming a scatological spatterstry of images from pop culture. With SFTF, however, Matt Hulse makes a deeply thoughtful attempt to try and understand how meaning emerges between the image and the lived experience. This approach might not have the instant lure of Keen but it rewards the intrepid voyager who is willing to rough it. During the film there seems to be a shift towards creating understanding from collaborative engagement in something less deliberate. Being less intentional could be a way of getting closer to the felt intensity of the Hippies. To get to this point where the story emerges into real life Hulse had to do a lot of house-keeping. The film decided to make Hulse get in the way of the meaning by trying to make himself understood. Hulse then obliterates the vessel to assemble something out of the resulting temporal substance. The film’s materially vital approach is made approachable through a veneer of whimsy but the aim is to somehow pan for the cosmic immanence in all creative affirmations (I don’t btw mean the film is in any way whimsical just that this register below linguistic order can often be interpreted thus). I felt the pain of the process in the film and then felt my cynicism dissolve. The film’s inhouse music-psychologist explains, “you can look at those pieces on the floor and you can make something new out of them – and it’s stronger because it’s been made from the pieces of your existing life”.
I digress. There were times in the film where I was reminded of how Punk could lead itself down deadends by trying to repeat the same trick. The vicious postures and the not infrequent destructive manipulations of punk were a vestigial by-product of using a speculative crowbar into the realm of visceral feeling. The similarity of this word to viscera got mixed up (in my head at least). “Mummy I'm not an animal”. Blood, spit, spunk and bodily fluids became part of punk’s syntax. Not vocabulary that is too much like polite communication. I believe there is a syntax to expression. We make a mistake when we consider all visceral understanding to be base or crude. Punk knew this you filthy fucker you. When the urge to destroy and rend an opening onto something experiential became part of a coded language it ceased to be wholly useful. Same goes for the shift of situationist detournement to scam and manipulation. “It feels manipulative” said the real-life psychotherapist. Are you using people in the film or are you creating a materially vital expression of our potential to freely create and therefore love? It felt, to me, like all of these issues are swirling around in the first part of Sound for the Future: Dancing on McLaren’s grave, kissing his death mask is all very punk and somehow made me think of a Faustian effort to desperately trying to invoke the devil himself but not too much in case it works. Obviously! I’m projecting. Punk and Sound for the Future make sense when the meaning emerges from the process. And boy does SFTF have some transformational delights once life and creative endeavour have been smashed together in Hulse’s patented rolled up cardboard hard-on-colliding telescope. The emergence before our eyes of transformed human organisms as Generation Riot feel their way into a live radio session and interview is an occasion of real-life fiction-becoming. The gentle suggestion by one of the young auditionees that the people in this film should be “rude but polite”, at the same time, is also genius. Punk as things and identities is dead but punk as process and emergence dances on the graves of those who would inhibit our capacities.
Hulse’s patented rolled up cardboard hard-on-colliding telescope
The easy route would have been a coming-of-age story but SFTF, remember is also a coming-of-aging film. It’s dislocated “trust-events” serve as a reminder that every image is death. Eventually through ritual and incantation, “Gré-Hashi-Bashi-Rolly-Poley-Pottinger”, the spell is cast and to a sound track of the Dream of Gerontius, the director’s mother meets with her prepubescent children once again. Who needs a Delorean when you’ve got parallel editing and haptic fictioning? I am not a fan of trompe d’oeiul nor am I a fan of pointing out that film is a series of still images. In other words a trick. I mean come on, cognition is all a trick, the point is to descend below into the realm of actual occasions. No one has a projector screen in their head and like perception, film as a materially vital assemblage of experience and matter-flow produces temporal substance. When you leave the cinema (walk away from the laptop) and the world’s atmosphere feels like that of the film might that not be because the film has prised open the realm of feeling meaning? Suspend your disbelief but do so knowing that your access to the aesthetic realm of living will be sealed up by the tomb-builders of your inner despot (the one who inhibits capacities to create). Yes it might be more straight forward to craft a story of the Hippies as a tastefully retro-styled film about memory alone (like a good boy should) but making his last-ever movie as a coming-of-aging fabric-of-the-cosmos weaving, dislocated digital symphony was what Matt Hulse chose to try and make instead. For it to really work some real failure had to be woven into the plot. Not just pretend failure for the sake of the story arc. How much more affective is Andy Gill’s gentle attempt to destroy his feedback generating guitar with a softly ejaculated “Jesus” than the cover image of Paul Simonon on London Calling, which representationally speaking, “perfectly captures the anarchic rage and defiance that The Clash stood for” (BBC 6music)?
The film’s embodied punk understanding is also about freeing the spectator as well. Towards the end of Side-A of SFTF Hulse is wound up in that brown sticky tape that artists use to stretch paper. Horrible stuff that reminds me of making paintings for A level art. Horrible but also deliciously evocative of the visceral taste of licking big brown envelope gum. I will be honest and say that on first viewing I had found the film hard going until this point. This was definitely more to do with me but it seemed hard work, like chewing your food the requisite number of times before swallowing. Editor Nick Currey’s delightful cut-up animations lightened my mood because they let in some air and offered a gentle respite from thinking about stuff (also note Currey’s deadliest of deadpan spoof films, Rock Polytechnic, secreted in the films closing credits). I took a break and thought about the lightness that was going to enter into the film when I returned. Sitting meditating after I had watched the film (but not the credits!) a vision of those gorgeous fragile balsa wood aeroplanes came to mind and how pleasurable it was to wind them up just enough to let them fly gracefully through the air. In the certainty of the meditator’s trance I concluded that this is what Hulse was doing. His rubber band was not perished and still elastic enough to launch the B-side of the film on a zephyr of warm longing for an unlived future. On the B-Side the plane glides over the wasty-land of embodied memories that Matt Hulse has scratched with heroic effort into the concrete supports a motorway bridge. I harbour a radical longing for the uncertain joyous fulfilment of the B-side, inhabiting as I do a digital realm where the middle-eight is deemed an excess. I long for the possibility of the “good places” the singer of Generation Riot professes their music will take them to. The scene with this band of rejects on Radio Camglen is the most uplifting authentic piece of real-life fictioning you will ever encounter. It reminds me of the joy of how being in a band can sometimes be an entangling of creation and becoming in an intensity of aesthetic reality. This dynamic form of autopoiesis, by the way, is what punk means to me. I was once lucky enough to stumble through a door in Brighton’s Kemptown district that led to just such a realm of radical ontology in fictioning. But that, as they say, is another story.
Hulse wound up in gummy art-tape like a rubber-band balsa wood prop plane.
Having spent two years of my life religiously buying the Melody Maker and the NME to catch any updates on my own band and often bemoaning the state of music journalism I never really considered that I would be a reviewer of other people’s art. At the moment though, this feels like my metier. I mean this actual moment. It is where I find my freedom. Where I can almost let go and feel it. How do we get out of the way of the art? The first half of SFTF felt like a form of self-flagellation I am familiar with, having dabbled in mythopoetic auto-biographical performance as The Vessel for David Devant (a Victorian magician). How lovely and synchronicitous then, that when I returned to the film after my break, we are asked the question what was the stick thing they used to beat Jesus with? Freedom and love are at the heart of Sound for the Future. It is only by replacing an idea of deconstruction with potential actual break-down that SFTF can explore the paradoxical nature of co-dependency and how manipulation and striving for control prevent love from gaining any traction. The fire rituals, enactments and bringing together of art and life threaten to destroy the film and it’s director whose delicate wings are luckily only singed. There is a touch of August Strindberg in the way Hulse invites us to consider his sanity if only because sanity is a form of consensus, phallocentric reality.
Matt and I have history. As well as being a famous projectionist during a tour, he once made a video for our band and I was happy to let people think it was me striding around a bucolic landscape watching a total eclipse in the nude. It seems only fair, then that Matt gets to describe himself as The Vessel for a bigger project towards the end of the film. And also a reminder that even psychotherapy can be useful. As mentioned the musical psychologist in the film describes how you can construct a new vessel from the broken pieces of the old one. I thought about when I, through the power of contingent alchemy, became a strange emergent magical celebrity for a couple of years and how suddenly my family no longer knew who I was. This episode with the psychologist in Sound for the Future has given me some sort of sense of how to pick up the pieces. I will certainly be watching SFTF a few more times to relive its gently crafted sense of life as emergent. I can understand why Matt might have told his producer this might be his last ever film because it has everything but doesn’t move towards a sense of finality. At its tail end, Sound for the Future tipped its hat and a rabbit scurried off, its scut flicking into the twilight blush of punk’s glowing embers. “Do you have a problem with that?” asks the Camglen DJ after revealing that The Hippies themselves had been into the studio earlier that day. The short but confident reply of “Yeah we do” is ineffable and uplifting. Creative entanglement is also about defining boundaries it seems.
Films make truth don’t they? Truth is about proof and the photographic image (of The Hippies) proves that life is made up of unique individual instances. This version of truth means Punk might be a safety pin or a postcard of a mohawk by a Chelsea Pensioner on the King’s Road but this is to use representational thinking. The standardisation of civilised culture demands that we all embody representational thought and then address these limits with an interest, say going to the gym or YouTube origami. All categories of difference are unified by an underlying conceptual framework that creates this taxonomy of distinctions, making them all the same, “Representational thought has merely numerically distinct substances and merely conceptual mediation of possibility, confusing these with real distinction.” (Metcalfe - What is Univocity?) I don’t think its too big a leap to connect this shift from representational order to experiential understanding to accessing the freedom required for love described by Matt’s mum in SFTF. The point about a representational structure is that we are always thinking that we make choices, which is part of an oppositional means of defining. Freedom is a means through which the organism defines itself by affirmative action outside and within the frames of linguistic reference. ‘Love is bigger than romantic or married love – love is sort of love love,” Ruth says in a way that reveals the truth in calling a punk band The Hippies. The representational mode of hierarchy-renewal is the phallocentric bubble of intellectual transcendence that Punk sought to puncture. How can a bubble be phallocentric you ask? Good question but one that derives from the Empire of Like’s culture of analogy (this is like this and this is like this) based on the communication model made possible by the discrete numerical parcels of data we consider difference. Punk, on the other hand, was based on the expression model and it is this shift from communication to expression that I experienced in Sound for the Future. The representational modern mind might think that the “bricolage” of SFTF is a kind of synthesis of semiotic values when actually it’s about accessing the contingent embodied process of meaning-making in becoming rather than assuming the existence of some kind of pre-formed spectrum of categories. Like Matt Hulse’s film, Punk had to risk being gauche, superstitious, awkward, stupid, shameful, indecent, manipulative and imbecilic to arrive on the plane of immanence where the drone’s eye view reveals the one substance-ness of all that has been and ever will be. *And we don’t care. Sound for the Future is an emotional and profound coming-of-aging film and below the surface is a simple idea that below the surface it can never be too late for affirmative emergence. Why did you form the band? “We thought we would take our greatness and come together,” says the transformed singer of Generation Riot, Holly Stevenson. Perhaps the real reason you should definitely seek out Sound For The Future is not to understand more about the cultural resonances of punk but to understand more about yourself.
Illustration made by the reviewer for New Punctums, Proto-Perceptions and Animated Entanglements by Prof. Tony Sampson
Mikey Georgeson
