Richard Rigg British, b. 1980
Hi Miles
Very sorry to hear the car set on fire,
i realized on the phone the other day i gave you slightly misleading information in the wrong film, date and the name the wrong way round, i will blame being in the middle of a building site and the hour sleep i had which tends to heighten dyslexia and my general confusement, but unreliable all the same, as is this description,
The sample of the song which was lifted from a wrongly titled source from the internet, (this is more interesting now ive, in a way, done the same)
its the recording that was made and used in the Film Damnation (1987) by Bela Tarr (although not actually from the film) the songs name is Kesz az egesz, which translate as Over and Done, which is the title of the piece by Mihály Vig
it is a song about complete loss and i wanted it to use something that was almost obsolete in itself (but not quite) using tape, which again is more of a slight lament to a physical relation to something, (and film) so its the loss of something and the technology used in referencing things nostalgic and i suppose the way that nostalgia is always a present feeling, so this loop is trying to extend that in some way, and maybe more to try and make the loss last forever, in a limited way thoe, in its using the infinity loop as its path, and since it taken from an archive on the internet then run back through old equipment is sort of a corrupted or false like a memory of something,
the film documents a reclusive man's withdrawal from the world and his increasing obsession with a singer, the scene is a man walking into a bar in the rain, in the film the rain can be heard along with the faint song where it cuts to the bar with a 'torch' singer who is singing Kesz az egesz,
the song references in one line a sort of dream in a way of Shangri-La, which is an utopian vision (with a catch) of a fictional place from a novel called Lost Horizons (which you may well know) by James Hilton
im slightly hesitant about doing this as with most of the work its trying not to root or locate it in any particular instance/place or whatever, but its probably good to occasionally break with the rule, so here its more pin pointing something (in a piece of music and relation to a film) it is something thoe which is more interested in the way nostalgia is in itself this sort of displacement as a similar sort of aim with some other work
But its the song lyrics from a translation i have, i think are the most interesting part, but and there not included in the work,
so the loop is just taken from the beginning so its a sample of a song about loss without getting to the but that tells you about the loss, which is an attempt to amplify this loss somehow, to just a emotion possibly,
Best Wishes
richard