theo jemison

In honor of Low End Theory’s Japan benefit show tomorrow, we are posting VJ/artist/electronic musician Strangeloop’s guide to sci-fi, avant-garde anime and films that feel like DMT trips. He brings the psychedelic visuals that accompany the sonic landscapes of Flying Lotus, who he met in college. His favorite film may or may not exist in full and we might never know because its creator is an internet-phobic lunatic. This interview by Lainna Fader.

FANTASTIC PLANET (RENÉ LALOUX, 1973)

“Fantastic Planet is an animated science fiction film directed by René Laloux. I think Flying Lotus was the first person to show it to me when we were going to college together. I love the artist and I strive for a lot of his aesthetics in my drawings. I really like the alien worlds he makes. It’s totally idiosyncratic and unique and doesn’t have any counterparts. There’s nothing like it.”

TEKKONKINKREET (MICHAEL ARIAS, 2006)

“It’s from an animation studio called Studio 4°C and they’re probably my favorite animation studio today. I sample more clips from them than anyone else, like Tekkonkinkreet, Mind Game, Noiseman Sound Insect. Very avant-garde Japanese animation. Pretty consistently when I play shows people come up to me and ask about the clip with the nuclear explosion and it’s always either Tekkonkinkreet or another Studio 4°C film. In the last few decades there’s been a handful of really incredible animated sci-fi films like Ghost in the Shell and Miyazaki stuff, and in the last ten years, in this century, the champions have been Studio 4°C. Philosophically they’re dealing with a lot of stuff we’re dealing with as a species.”

AKIRA (KATSUHIRO OTOMO, 1988)

“There’s a handful of quintessential sci-fi from the last few decades. If someone tells me they’re interested in anime but don’t know where to start, this is the film I tell them to see. I still don’t think it’s been topped. It’s all hand-drawn. The amount of work that went into making that epic is phenomenal and it’s prophetic on certain levels. As far as the philosophy they get into, it’s pretty heavy. I love that film a lot.”

NAQOYQATSI (GODFREY REGGIO, 2002)

“In a way I could say Koyaanisqatsi—it’s kind of a better film, but I put Naqoyquatsi on this list because I’ve sampled it more, and I was more influenced by its aesthetics primarily because there are sequences in the film that are like downloads. It’s not a narrative film at all. It’s this download of history and imagery and I was influenced by that notion that in media you can move away from narrative into this place where you give people bursts of information and association. And since I’m a total fractal geek, it’s one of the first films that I know of that has a full-on fractal sequence in it—a mathematical visualization.”

ENTER THE VOID (GASPAR NOÉ, 2009)

“Dopest fucking film of the last five years. Everyone’s talking about it right now for good reason. It’s historical because it’s a film which brought DMT and mystical experiences into a more mainstream form and from a mythological standpoint it manages to capture the look and feel of altered states, like the DMT trance or other hallucinatory states. It’s the first film I saw where I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’ Trippy sequences in film aren’t always cohesive–they can be confusing and weird and they don’t capture the sort of cohesiveness and complexity and visuals on altered states.”

PI (DARREN ARONOFSKY, 1998)

“Pi was one of the first films to put the computer nerd in this punk rock protagonist position. The main character is this software engineer on a search for God in the computer. It’s an exciting pursuit and it’s one of the first films to successfully make the software geek someone exciting and interesting. I want to highlight the idea of people using technology to search for God and the divine. When I was really young that blew me away. Even though the main character is pretty schizophrenic, on some levels I kind of wanted to be him.”

STALKER (ANDREY TARKOVSKY, 1979)

“Tarkovsky is probably my favorite filmmaker if I’m thinking of the whole spectrum of a filmmaker’s work. Stalker is great because it’s kind of a sci-fi film but it’s also not. Tarkovsky managed with Solaris and Stalker to make a totally unique branch of sci-fi where nature is the alien element and civilized human life is what is keeping us from that alien element. In Stalker, he manages to make normal nature landscapes these foreboding, mystical places. Very few sci-fi films get to that more interesting, deeply philosophical territory.”

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY, 1973)

“There’s nothing like this film. I love that it’s become this default video put on at events. Holy Mountain playing at music events is almost a cliché at this point, but for good reason. It’s a truly psychedelic film but it’s also deeply rooted in mystical symbolism and is intelligently constructed. It’s silly and ridiculous. You don’t see that much effort and time and money put toward those kinds of ideas that often. It’s kind of a unique thing that that film could even be made.”

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (STANLEY KUBRICK, 1968)

“It blew the lid off so early. It was maybe the first film to try to reach so far in scope—from the birth of man to the transcendence of man—and it manages to take the viewer on that whole journey. It also has this narrative structure I love where the third act is like the undoing of the narrative. In a way it’s the quintessential narrative of the mystical state. At a certain point the ego, time and space go out the window, and 2001 did that for a lot of people. It’s still one of the most important films ever made.”

SAMIZDAT (ROBERT DAWD, ?)

[video clips do not exist!]

“I’m not sure anyone’s ever heard of this film. I’m still trying to get a hold of a full copy. I was at Burning Man four or five years ago tripping on acid and I saw this VJ performing on a dome and doing the craziest things I’ve ever seen by far. I’ve based a lot of my imagery off his stuff. I talked to him and he showed me a film he was working on. He had all these crazy ideas about making films that could hypnotize people to the point where they would literally lose themselves completely into the film and forget about their lives and basically have a mystical experience. He had a lot of cool ideas but he seemed kind of crazy and I was coming off acid so that exaggerated it. The film was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. Really sophisticated fractal imagery all perfectly synched to sound. It was mind-blowing. He was attempting to finish it and showed me twenty minutes of it. It was going to be about an hour long. I’ve been in communication with him for a while over e-mail but he’s totally enigmatic. I can’t find any information on him anywhere. I think while being a total lunatic VJ he’s also internet-phobic—the total real deal. I’ll be collaborating with him at some point hopefully on some sort of film. That’s my favorite film. My friend told me ‘samizdat’ is something in a sci-fi novel. There’s this sci-fi novel called Infinite Jest and it describes this piece of media that sounds like what the dude was trying to create. It’s a piece of media someone starts watching in Los Angeles in 2010 that’s so mind-blowing, so entertaining, that people die from it. They stop eating, they stop drinking, they just sit and home and watch it till they die. I don’t know if he read that and was trying to make that piece of media, but it’s all pretty interesting.”

STRANGELOOP WITH Z TRIP, DADDY KEV, NOBODY, THE GASLAMP KILLER, D-STYLES, NOCANDO, JONWAYNE, RAS_G, AUSTIN PERALTA AND SAM XL PLUS LIVE SCREENPRINTING BY HIT + RUN ON THUR., MAR. 31, AT THE LOW END LOVES JAPAN BENEFIT AT THE ECHOPLEX, 1154 GLENDALE BLVD., ECHO PARK. 9 PM / $10-$12 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. 100% OF DOOR TO JAPANESE RED CROSS SOCIETY. VISIT STRANGELOOP AT MYSPACE.COM/STRANGELOOPTV.