Description
Last year, filmmaker Oliva Wyatt invited Bitchin Bajas to add incidental music to the climatic sounds of her feature-length experimental documentary on the nomadic Moken people, Sailing A Sinking Sea. This new album release packages the soundtrack LP with a DVD of the film, thus opening sev- eral windows to the eternal questions posed on both formats and providing two distinct pieces of art coming from the same source. Sailing A Sinking Sea is a fea- ture-length experimental documen- tary exploring the culture of the Mo- ken people of Burma and Thailand. The Moken are a seafaring commu- nity and one of the smallest ethnic minority groups in Asia, tradition- ally spending eight months out of the year in thatch-roofed wooden boats. Wholly reliant upon the sea, their entire belief system revolves around water. Sailing A Sinking Sea weaves a visual and aural tapestry of Moken mythologies and pres- ent-day practices. As a viewer you will swim under the sea past fishes and mermaids, sail boats across turquoise waters, land on 13 dif- ferent islands, step inside sea shan- ties on stilts, delve into the minds of shamans, become possessed through the worship of sea gods, dance between lovers and emerge drenched in Moken mythology. Bitchin Bajas were tapped to add to the already-existing raft of water sounds and other field re- cordings captured in the film. They were shown scenes, and with subtle directions from Wyatt, laid down music in the vibe of the environment, making particularly satisfying use of auto-harps in the process. Mark McNeill at Dublab did a mix com- piling film sounds and soundtrack pieces that gave the album an aquatic flow, with waves of water, Moken voices and songs and cascades of autoharp, synth, bells and flute lapping up against each other, producing a sense of time passing in its ultimate waysome- how timelessly; today twined with the epic tail of history and the million forgotten days stretching behind. The sound of the real in- termingling with the music of the mind pro- vides a hypnotic, album-length interpolation. This loving impressionistic tribute is...an outlier in contemporary cinema, springing as it does from the 1930s ethnographic cin- ema of Robert Flaherty as well as the later visions of Jean Rouch in the 60s and Robert Gardner (whos cited in the credits) in the Carson Lund, Slant Magazine of the energies of Sinking a Sailing Seas incredible images. Executive-produced by Will Oldham, Sinking a Sailing Sea was premiered at SXSW in the 2015 Visions Catgory, and it went on to receive its international premiere at Hot Docs. It has gone on to be shown a a number of festivals including Margaret Mead, BFI London, and the Singapore Inter- national Film Fest, where it recently won the Audience Choice award. OLIVIA WYATT is an award-win- ning filmmaker and photographer based in Los Angeles. She is a member of the Sublime Frequen- cies film and music collective. She has directed, produced, shot and edited three
- Internal ID: JITRE
- Handling Note: **Please allow an additional 72 hours for this item's shipment.**
- Format Detail: LP & DVD
- Format: Vinyl
- Genre: Rock
- Released: 5/13/16