Marvo Movie

“Noise Art” is a posthumous collection of Jeff Keen’s sound work, comprising cassette recordings created during the 1980s for his expanded cinema shows. That phrase fits Keen’s films very well. Their strobe-like barrage of imagery impacts the eye like visual noise, while the soundtracks feel like aural blatz-poems, combustible palimpsests of voice and noise, hiss and fizz. The late Mark Fisher once enthusiastically wrote how one of his films, Rayday Film (1968–70), “is soundtracked by an exhilarating roar of abstract noise that possesses a pleasure-in-pain jouissance worthy of Merzbow. A collage of manipulated voice, chopped and chomped so that it’s devoid of any sense, it resembles a dada chant, or Damo Suzuki being tortured, or a swarming buzz of malign spirits being routed by an exorcist.” Keen’s breakthrough film Marvo Movie is no less of a cineblitz. A rapid-fire montage of sequences of Keen and friends dressed in a variety of costumes and masks are superimposed over cuttings from newspapers and comics and various moving toys. The wildly incantatory soundtrack was recorded in a quick afternoon (just in time for a screening in Liverpool) by Keen, sound artist Annea Lockwood and concrete poet Bob Cobbing. Upon seeing Marvo Movie, filmmaker Ken Russell was famously quoted as saying, "It went right over my head and seemed a little threatening, but I’m all for it." (Stoffel Debuysere)