Music That Will Swallow All Misery Whole

Give me noise and feel the drone!

This has been a labour of love. I've been wanting to write up a tribute to drone music for ages, but have never been sure of how to go about it. Drone is so vast, so unpredictable and so out-there as to defy definition and categorisation. But fuck me, the world needs to hear more of it! It's actually been on the rise in the musical underground, and you can even get albums by the likes of Emeralds at HMV on London's Oxford Street. So, drone is on the up, and the more innocent ears are introduced to this strange and difficult latter-day psychedelia, the better.

I don't want to go through a massive history of drone music. That's for other, more scholarly, people to do. Suffice to say that it has existed since the dawn of music itself, whether through Tibetan chanting, Indian traditional music, Japanese tam-tams or Celtic bagpipes. The sheer immensity of the sounds produced imbued drone with a sense of the spiritual, as if the music was channeling the souls of dead ancestors and wrathful gods.

By the time the 20th century rocked up, all this was a thing of the past. Generations of opera, concertos, folk, rock and jazz had superseded the primeval allure of drone, and it would take such controversial pioneers as LaMonte Young, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Tony Conrad (pictured below) to re-establish drone in contemporary music. Theses composers were looking to expand the boundaries of what was deemed "music", and were fascinated by notions of minimalism, repetition and distortion. This led to the creation of some of the most vital and fascinating pieces of contemporary music ever created, to which we can also add the works of Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley and Charlemagne Palestine.

But these artists remained entrenched in the avant-garde scenes of New York, Berlin and Tokyo, loved by the Warholian elites and the intellectuals, misunderstood or ignored by the mainstream public. It's telling that the most famous avant-garde composer/singer remains Yoko Ono, and -sadly- not for her music.

Ono is actually a good reference point, for she was one of a number of these avant-garde artist/composers -along with Conrad, Takehisa Kosugi or John Cale- to see the potential in rock music and, working with John Lennon, would take great strides in marrying the two. Above all, the exploratory music of the avant-garde (which in addition to drone took in elements of found sounds, tape loops, electronic manipulation and noise) touched a cord with the intellectuals and students of the West who were simultaneously (we are now in the mid- to late-sixties) embracing hippie culture and rock'n'roll. Out of this potent brew would come drone's great renaissance, as a separate genre unto itself within rock and pop music.

Perhaps the most famous art-rock act of all time, The Velvet Underground (right), were born in the midst of New York's effervescent art and avant-garde scene. They were the proteges of maverick art superstar Andy Warhol, and included in their midst none other than John Cale, a Welsh violinist, guitarist and experimentalist who had previously featured in LaMonte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music/Dream Syndicate experimental supergroup (which also featured Tony Conrad and Marian Zazeela, among many others), one of the forerunner bands of electronic drone.

The VU would get zero recognition during their "lifetime", but quickly rose to cult superstardom as their influence extended beyond their arty origins and into mainstream pop and rock. They were never a drone band per se, but Cale's influence is keenly felt across their first two albums (The Velvet Underground & Nico and White Light/White Heat), as repetitive guitar riffs and motorik drum beats act as the blankest of canvases for the arcane and twisted lyrics of singer Lou Reed. This is no more keenly felt than on their magnum opus 'Sister Ray', a 17-minute thumping drone-rock masterpiece in which drummer Mo Tucker keeps up a relentlessly simplistic and monotonous drum rhythm whilst Cale and Reed buzz along discordantly on their axes. This track, which would have a massive influence on a generation of refuseniks, punks and garage rockers, lays the foundation of drone in rock music, for it never once deviates from its repetitive path, keeping up the implacable rhythm and stark melody without altering, colouring or embellishing it with solos, flourishes or texture. Not drone, but surely the essence of it.

Interestingly, the band's former "chanteuse", German model Nico, would go on to have a fascinating solo career in which her instrument of choice would be the harmonium, a particularly powerful pump organ keyboard often used in traditional Indian music. Indian music regularly features drone as a key element (sitars, sarods, sarangi, etc). Indeed, whilst drone instruments like the bagpipes became obsolete in Europe, Asian musicians continued to embrace their traditional roots and tools. Following The Beatles' very public embracing of all things Indian, the West was introduced to the country's many musical delights, another element that facilitated the revival of drone in popular music.

But, typically, it would be away from the musical hubs that were America and the UK that a genre as difficult as drone would flourish. Whilst it would only appear sporadically in those countries' pop music (usually in psychedelic, fusion and underground music), it was becoming a staple in two other territories: Japan and Germany.

For a proper and comprehensive overview of the cultural and musical context of these two countries in the sixties and seventies, I cannot recommend Julian Cope's two books Krautrocksampler and Japrocksampler highly enough. There were definite similarities between both territories, as the radical youth and student bodies rejected the imperialism and intolerance of their parents' generations, that had led to war and genocide, instead projecting further back into the past to the traditional music and culture of their forefathers. They also more often than not showed a reluctance to embrace the "new cultural imperialism" of America and -to a lesser extent- Britain, quite often motivated by Communist ideals. Add to this the fact that both countries were havens for free jazz and experimental / avant-garde music (Stockhausen was a German, whilst Japan was home to some of the world's most vibrant Fluxus artists), and you got a strange mix of modernism and traditionalism, one that embraced "rock" as a form of revolt against the squares whilst also trying to take it in new directions, well removed from what was going on in the US or the UK. The result was that the underground music scenes of Japan and Germany from '68 to '75 were quite probably the most fertile and innovative in the world. And this was the ideal context for Drone music to thrive.

And even at this early stage (we're talking 1970, here), the two basic strands of modern drone (or dronology, as we're apparently supposed to call it) were becoming apparent.

On the one hand, drone would be a music of projected futurism, the vast aural soundscapes used to evoke 21st century cities and machinery. This would become even more frequent in later years, as synthesizers and computers became the norm, to the extent that drone has become blended with ambient music and electronica. On the other hand, drone was connected to traditional music and even folk, with its proponents obsessed with long-forgotten Gods and pagan religions, much in the way heavy metal bands and folk artists would be from Black Sabbath, Comus and Led Zeppelin right up to modern acts like Agalloch and Tenhi. Dark ambience and drone, usually created with electric guitars, deep bass and subdued percussion, would become another way for neo-Wodenists and wannabe shamen to re-connect with their ancestral roots.

In Germany, the greatest exponents of modernist drone were undoubtedly Berlin duo Cluster. They evolved out of the German capital's fervent underground scene, one that also included Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel and Conrad Schnitzler (who was a member of pre-Cluster act Kluster before going solo), all of whom also added elements of drone into their works. Indeed ART's importance as a precursor to drone is almost as substantial as The Velvet Underground's, as guitarist Manuel Gottsching was a master of the sustained one-note solo, whilst drummer Klaus Schulze (also an ex-Tangerine Dream member) alternated his octopus-like skins-pounding with electronic exploration on organ and synth, creating vast, shimmering ambient/drone epics that would take whole sides of ART's albums before taking things even further as a solo artist (see below).

Cluster seen with Michael Rother as part of seminal motorik act Harmonia

Between them, all these bands and artists helped launch a strand of what would later be dubbed in the UK as "krautrock" known as kosmische, and it was distinctive in its spacey, psychedelic approach to music (quite removed from the experimental free-jazz-inspired rock of West Germany's Can and Faust, or the robotic funk of Neu! and early Kraftwerk). In this, drone was fundemental, thanks to its expansiveness and slow pace. In this, Berlin's drone was a truly unique form of psychedelic music.

With Ash Ra Tempel and Schnitzler's Eruption having tentatively shown the way, the first great German drone opus would be Cluster's Cluster 71, released in January of that year. Although it completely bombed and would later spend decades unreleased in any format, there can be no denying the impact Cluster 71 had. It has only 3 tracks, one taking up and entire side of vinyl (ah, the good old days), and none dipping under 7 minutes in length! All this performed by just three individuals - Cluster's main duo Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius, and producer Conny Plank, who would go on to greater success as Kraftwerk's producer.

Describing Cluster 71 is tough, to be honest. None of the reviews I'd read of it, be they by Cope or no less than Wire magazine, prepared me for the sounds that emanated from my speakers after I pressed "play" the first time.

The music of Cluster is immense, planet-sized, titanic. Huge swathes of buzzing electronics rumble and shudder over you, cold and mechanical, like being caught inside the circuitry of some gigantic futuristic super-computer (intriguingly, for such serious music, the one I immediately think of is the computer from Douglas Adams' Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which perhaps highlights the subtle humour and sense of humanity hidden under Cluster's immense robotic sound).

Yet, for all its modernism and futurism, Cluster 71 intriguingly features not one synthesizer! It's all done through saturated guitars, distorted organs and bank upon bank of oscillators and sine-wave generators. That it sounds so ahead of its time is testament to the visionary talents of Roedelius, Moebius and Plank. Cluster would go on to release a spate of amazing electro-drone albums over the next decade or so, even collaborating with Brian Eno and performing with Neu! guitarist Michael Rother as part of the much under-appreciated Harmonia (whose Deluxe album is a masterpiece of motorik electronic pop-rock), and are even still going today. Theire recent epic live drone-a-thon Berlin 07 is well worth checking out to show how well these absolute pioneers have weathered the storms of age.

Cluster 71, already itself influenced by early Tangerine Dream and Eruption (plus their own work as Kluster), led the charge, and were quickly followed. Not to say everyone copied them, but rather that the ferile cultural climate in Germany at the time saw great ideas come to the fore simultaneously.

Tangerine Dream had already dabbled in elements of drone through leader Edgar Froese's buzzing guitar style and Conny Schnitzler's cello and violin on their debut, Electronic Meditation, and expanded into electronic ambience on the follow-up, 1971's Alpha Centauri (displaying the space/futurist concepts more fully). They really went to town, however, on 1972's Zeit, a four-track double-album so huge it remains hard to approach even today. The opener, 'Birth of Liquid Plejades' is a moog masterpiece, whilst elsewhere shimmering synths, distorted organ and moody cello helped set a tone of dark sci-fi gloominess, making Zeit their only full drone opus. They'd deliver some more drone/psych on 73's Atem, before moving into pulsating electro-ambience with the smash-hit Phaedra.

Meanwhile, former TD drummer Klaus Schulze had topped his previous comrades by unleashing his first solo album, Irrlicht, the same year as Zeit. It's a more concise, atmospheric record, featuring just Klaus on a titanic organ, and a stripped-down orchestra who apparently flipped out at the sounds they were being asked to create by the Berlin maverick. Irrlicht is massive and terrifying, two 20-minute-plus tracks of sheer cosmic drone, and as dark and twisted as the nastiest black metal. Indeed, Irrlicht sees drone going the second way I mentioned, as the title is German for 'Will-o'-the-wisp', those ghostly lights that sometimes appear over foggy marshes, anchoring it in a tradition of German folk and mythology (ghosts, pagan gods and magic, etc.) rather than futuristic sci-fi. As such, it is probably the darkest and most unsettling of all the German drone albums.

Schulze, like TD, would go on to produce a series of odd and beguiling albums that crossed over from pure drone to ambient electronica, eventually ending up in trance, techno and acid house. The follow-up to Irrlicht, however, was Cyborg, like TD's Zeit a massive double album featuring four tracks of pulsating electronics and buzzing futuristic organ. The arrival of more modern synths would deliver such forward-thinking electro albums as Blackdance, Timewind, Moondawn and X, but he'd only rarely return to the cathedral-sized drone of Irrlicht.

Drone wasn't, however, solely the domain of Berlin kosmische acts. In the remote area of Wumme in Northern Germany, wild and mysterious experimental band Faust, who had already released two bizarre albums to high critical praise (to the point that they'd soon be signed by Richard Branson's nascent Virgin label), teamed up with no less than premier New York avant-garde violinist Tony Conrad and recorded what may just be my favourite drone album of all time, Outside the Dream Syndicate. It was a match made in heaven, with bassist Jean-Herve Peron, drummer Werner Diermaier and guitarist/keyboardist Rudolf Sosna (3/4 of Faust) providing a solid, repetitive, relentless groove over which Conrad is able to unleash subtly-shifting, hypnotic treated viola. It's a single-minded album, the changes are barely perceptible or non-existant, to the point of autism. Most people I play it for go spare at the lack of clear dynamics. But therein lies the sheer, ground-breaking force of Outside the Dream Syndicate. Where albums like Irrlicht or LaMonte Young's Dream House 78'17" countered the monotony of drone by gradually cranking up the volume and/or shifting the tempos, Conrad and Faust make no such concessions to consumer sensitivities. Outside the Dream Syndicate barely moves, yet keeps going, a graceful, insistent force that is unlike 90% of anything else I've ever heard in modern music. That it remained a glorious one-off until a couple of recent live performances only adds to its aura.

Whilst Germany was embracing drone so emphatically, something similar was happening on the other side of the world in Japan. By the mid-60s, the Land of the Rising Sun had developped a vibrant underground and experimental scene, where jazz and performance art ruled supreme. At the same time, Japan's radicalised youth embraced several traditional art forms such as Kabuki and No theatre and gagaku music, whilst simultaneously rejecting the authoritarian traits that had characterized their parents' imperialist Japan. This led to new and fresh forms of art and music, where Fluxus flourished and free-jazz and avant-garde music soon replaced the be-bop and eleki surf music of the previous decade-and-a-half.

Integral to traditional Japanese music has always been the influence of Buddhist chanting, whilst instruments such as tam-tams often served to create sustained, droning textures. As these influences filtered down to Japanese youth, drone music soon became a frequent component of the underground music scene.

At the forefront of this development was a former Fluxus artist and performer called Takehisa Kosugi, who had been a founder of radical music collective Group Ongaku. At the end of the sixties, and after a stint as a TV composer, he formed the Taj Mahal Travellers, a bizarre and singularly Japanese psychedelic group who combined Kosugi's modulated violin and modern synths with traditional flutes, shamisens, harmonicas and chanting to create massive, ever-shifting soundscapes that mirrored the droning cathedral sound of Klaus Schulze's Irrlicht, without ever sounding like the German maetro's record. Instead, Taj Mahal's Travellers' music -immortalised on their July 15, 1972 and August 1974 albums- creates a mystical, ancient vibe, evoking wind-swept hills, bleak cold mountain tops and grey beaches. It's music for crumbling temples and forgotten citadels, and it takes time (luckily all their tracks hover around the 15-25' mark) to absorb all the subtle sound effects and instrumental flourishes that creep in to the main mix of Kosugi's modulated violin and his band-mates' chanting. Unlike Schulze's masterwork, or Outside the Dream Syndicate, there's a lot going on in TMT's music, and a lot of people improvising (for it's all imprvised), creating drone that is densely-layered, unpredictable and complex. So it's most interesting to note that so much time is given over to silence on the band's albums, surely a nod to John Cage's concept of "performed silence".

Taj Mahal Travellers

Parallel to his adventures with Taj Mahal Travellers -who would go on a semi-constant world tour, performing in art galleries, performance halls and natural spaces across the globe, from Sweden to America to the steps of the Taj Mahal itself- Takehisa Kosugi recorded a solo work of even greater achievement, a two-track monster drone-a-thon called Catch-Wave (released between July 15, 1972 and August 1974 in 1975). The first is an immense freak-out on violin, whilst the second track features a superimposition of Kosugi's voice as he howls a wordless chant in call-and-response fashion. It's very hard to get hold of, but I strongly urge anyone reading (all those millions of you, of course) to track it down.

Whilst Kosugi and TMT were creating all this spaced-out drone, other Japanese artists were turning to a different form of musical minimalism, inspired by The Velvet Underground and -oddly- future MOR rockers Chicago, whose first album featured a wild freak-out called "Free-form guitar".

NOISE!!! The first to succumb to the allure of rampant noise were free-jazzers like Masayuki Takayanagi and Kaoru Abe (check out the latter's superb Jazz Bed if you get the chance - it's mad! Easily equal to Peter Brotzmann's supreme noise-fest Machine Gun), before supreme underground refusenik Takashi Mizutani (below) took things to their most extreme level via his ever-changing, never-officially-recorded uber-rebel band Les Rallizes Denudes. Waves of distorted guitar over basic rhythm would become Les Rallizes' modus operandi, that and Mizutani's refusal to enter a studio, refusal to release any "official" albums and refusal to court any form of publicity, becoming rock's most obscure hermit. That Les Rallizes somehow managed to gain cult status through an avalanche of bootlegs speaks volumes (no pun intended, though this is fucking loud music) for the allure of their singular noise-rock. Beyond drone, beyond rock, even, the free-form noise of Takayanagi, Abe, Les Rallizes Denudes and Keiji Haino's much-later band Fushitsusha is not for everyone, but I find it both hugely arresting and strangely soothing.

To be honest, though, even I find noise music hard to deal with. It's not meant to be enjoyable. Free-jazz noise, of the kind espoused by Abe, Takayanagi, Brotzmann and others such as Sonny Sharrock and Evan Parker, at least sticks to typically jazz sense of modality and rhythm. It's never "easy-listening" but, Abe and Takayanagi's dual album Kaitaiteki Koukan aside, it does have structure. By the time Fushitsusha, and computer/synth noisemakers Merzbow, Pain Jerk or KK Null started their sonic assaults in the eighties and nineties, all structure was thrown out the window. Taking their cues from British and American industrial pioneers like Throbbing Gristle and Factrix, they generated harsh, atonal sonic miasmas destined to not so much be listened to, as subjected to. But there is evidently an audience for this, and whilst my main concern will be drone music, it's good to use this aside to highlight some important noise music from Japan and elsewhere.

Whilst Mizutani was exploring saturation and distortion through primordial r'n'r (the definitive bootleg record of this is the not-so-rare Live '77), one of his idols, former Velvet Underground singer/guitarist/songwriter Lou Reed decided to send the ultimate "fuck you" to his listeners and released Metal Machine Music, an hour-long, four-track double album of feedbacking guitar. Coming on the back of his massively successful Sally Can't Dance and Rock'n'Roll Animal albums, it was hard to tell if this was a terrible joke, or a work of challenging avant-garde daring. The truth is probably somewhere in-between, and critics loathed Metal Machine Music, spewing vitriol and bile over the man who created it. Typically, Reed just shrugged and moved on to something else. Over in Japan, though, rebellious refusenik Keiji Haino was taking note and would launch Fushitsusha, a band that melded Les Rallizes Denudes love for saturated riffs and warped vocals with MMM's extremism, something best encapsulated on 1994's Hisou (Pathetique).

Meanwhile, former fine art student Masami Akita started experimenting with tape loops and metal percussion, and changed his name to Merzbow (performing live, left). Before long, he'd moved into digitally-produced noise using computers, incidentally reconnecting the dots with drone music, ironically. A solo Merzbow release is heavy going, with buzzing, unchanging electronic noise filling your ears, only occasionally punctuated by bursts of feedback or metallic percussion. Personally, I have more affection for his recent collaborations with drone/doom metallers Boris (Sun Baked Snow Cave from 2005 and Rock Dream from 2007), NYC grunge emperimentalists Sonic Youth (on the excellent live collaboration Andre Sider Af Sonic Youth, which also featured free-jazz saxophonist Mats Gustafson) and 2008's electro-drone leviathan Keio Line with Richard Pinhas. Indeed, the way Merzbow has re-connected the harsh noise of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music with the seminal drone of, say, Takehisa Kosugi or Cluster is what makes him such an important artist.

So, back to drone. If its first heyday was in the early 60s, under the guidance of LaMonte Young, Pauline Oliveros and Charlemagne Palestine, and its second was a decade later thanks to the Germans, Japanese and occasional Anglo-Saxon musicians such as Brian Eno (check out the classic drone joint album with King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp (No Pussyfooting)), Harold Budd or Steve Reich. But it's incredible to witness the extent to which it is prevalent across underground and indy music today, and this since the early 90s, making this the most sustained period of drone popularity since, well, God knows. Culloden? The Ming dynasty days?

As popular music increasingly became a business, and the major labels moved towards MOR trash from the mid-seventies onwards (apart from a slight punk and post-punk blip), drone slowly moved back to the fringes (let's not forget that Cluster's first album came out on Philips records and that (No Pussyfooting) was released on Island), becoming most frequently an element among others in industrial rock (check out Throbbing Gristle's drone-and-punk-heavy 1977 album The Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle) or noise music, both of which were pretty underground, where drone would flourish.

Music has undergone a lot of change in the last two-and-a-half decades. As the mainstream became more homogenised, the underground has diverisfied. The fact is that there was only a certain extent to which every metal band, for example, could keep sticking to a Sabbath/Zeppelin/Kiss/Judas Priest/Purple formula. The arrival of punk in America gave rise to hardcore -fast-paced, urban and gritty- but even that quickly became formulaic. But, far from the gaze of the labels and media moguls, the spirit of the first Black Sabbath albums, those weird, folk-tinged heavy metal crunchers that were steeped in heathen British traditions and culture, continued to thrive. So, with common roots involved, it's no wonder a lot of indy metal owes so much to drone.

In 1993, this meeting of metal and drone was given one of its most lasting voices with the release of Seattle band Earth's second album, Earth 2. Earth were lead by a fucked-up grunge guitarist named Dylan Carlson, a friend of Kurt Cobain's, whose depressingly slow riffing style and taste for minimalism (the only other Earth member at this point was bassist Dave Harwell) created a sub-genre of doom metal called, you guessed it, drone doom. It's impact was considerable, with world-famous robed doom droners Sunn O))) actually starting up as a tribute to Earth!

Today, most of the drone I listen to follows the Earth formula: slow, impossibly long tracks usually featuring heavy, heavy guitar and bass and the odd smattering of barely-interested drums or keyboards. It's music for shaking your head to VERY slowly, preferably when stoned. Some flesh things out a bit. Philadelphia-based quintet Bardo Pond have two guitarists and a full-time drummer, but above all add the airy pipes and blissful flute of Isobel Sollenberger to their sound, best witnessed on 1995's 29-minute stomper "Amen" off their immense first album. Drone metal has therefore become the new true psychedelia (seriously, fuck The Dandy Warhols! They're nothing but vacant poseurs when placed next to the extreme stoners of Bardo Pond or the more psych-metal Acid Mothers Temple), as also evidenced by Japanese heavyweights Boris, quite possibly the best metal band still going today.

If you're a volume-freak (as I am), Japan remains the best place to go. Seriously, I went to a live gig by noise artist Pain Jerk, and I'm sure he rearranged my organs using volume alone! Mainliner, High Rise, Aube, Acid Mothers Temple, Melt Banana... the list of infinitely loud Japanese bands, be they metal, psych, drone or noise, is impressive. And Boris may just top them all. Regardless of whether they're doing "sturm und drang" speed metal, psychedelic post-metal (see their masterpiece Flood, one of the best albums of all time) or going for all out drone-a-thons, they're always killer, never more so than on At Last - Feedbacker, their droniest album ever. Like the best music of Earth, Nadja or Sunn O))), it's as heavy as fuck, a big, crunching mix of pounding drums, fuzzed-out guitar and warped vocals, but it never picks up any speed, the trio preferring to plod along, getting louder and louder until all you can feel are those guitars, those limitless guitars. I played it for a colleague who's very into Yoga and New Age stuff, and she loved it, such was its slow, all-encompassing, primordial power. She compared it to an intense yoga session. And see how we draw full-circle to the reference points in traditional Asian culture that first inspired Takehisa Kosugi and the Taj Mahal Travellers? Even when cranked up to full volume and chock full of electric instruments, drone retains its ancestral power, its foundations having been first laid down milennia ago.

Nadja live

Which is not to say that the Cluster/Tangerine Dream electronic futurist side of drone has now become obsolete. Far from it. In 1995, seminal shoegaze band Slowdive released their best album, Pygmalion, to universal indifference. Today, it stands as quite possibly the best album of the 90s. Tired of the shoegaze noise-guitar formula (very drony unto itself, it should be noted, check out "Sometimes" on My Bloody Valentine's Loveless for proof), the Slowdive gang immersed themselves in electronic music: trance, techno and ambient, then mixed in their guitar-centric approach and stoned out vocals to deliver an album that, for all its funereal pace, use of tape loops and slow electronic ambience, still today comes across as one of the most modern and forward-reaching albums ever. Dare I say it, it sounds post-modernist, futurist. It's the ghostly music of a heroin come-down, or the slow recovery in the early morning hours after a royal bender. It's hazy, druggy, mechanical, the soundtrack to a hungover train ride through a deserted city at 7am. The word is timeless.

But where Slowdive, betraying their more traditional rock background, stuck to vocals and guitars, others rushed headlong into the world of electronics. Austrian artist Fennesz's (left) Black Sea, from 2008, may contain his trademark saturated guitar drones, but its basis remains a carpet of buzzing electronica, computer-generated glitches and subtle ambience. Like the likes of Stars of the Lid and Eluvium (I strongly recommend the latter's Talk Amongst the Trees), Fennesz drone has as much in common with Music For Airports-era Eno and 90s trance music as it does with ghostly, ancient-sounding rock drone a la Nadja, Boris or Sunn O))). Kudos also to the massive dark sounds of Dutch musician Machinefabriek, Merzbow and Pinhas' urban guerilla electro-drone on Keio Line, and the spulchral ambience-and-tam tams droning of A Secret Life, a weird collaboration between former synth-poppers John Foxx and Steve Jansen, along with producer Steve D'Agostino.

The sheer number of bands and artists I've mentioned these last few paragraphs, who all started out in the 90s and 00s, shows one thing: that drone is perhaps more prevalent in rock music than ever before - despite the lack of support for drone bands from mainstream rock labels and press. In fact, if you look at this wee list I created on http://www.rateyourmusic.com/: http://rateyourmusic.com/list/Phimister/the_best_of_drone, 19 of the 43 albums were made after 2000! Obviously, said list only reflects my personal tastes, but it says a lot that such a large proportion of quality drone albums should have been made only in the last 9 years.

Part of it is ease. Drone does not require any sort of musical virtuosity to be made. Two chords on a heavily-saturated guitar at full volume can suffice to make an hour-long track that can, despite this simplicity, be challenging and unpredictable. So drone is cheap and easy to make. It's also a perfect form of musical rebellion these days. With so much popular music being of the bland Britney/Snoop/Libertines/Klaxons variety, bands are turning to extreme forms such as drone, noise or minimalism. Some are gently easing it into more mainstream rock and pop (Battles, Tortoise, Godspeed You! Black Emperor...), others are remaining resolutely absolutist, and are pleasingly getting bigger and bigger audiences, people tired of the afore-mentioned mainstream and flocking to their new sounds (it's all relative of course, no-one's gonna book the O2 Arena for Nadja, but the Pain Jerk gig I went to was packed, albeit in a small venue - and that was pure noise music!).

Most famous of these newer bands is surely Sunn O))) (right), a duo of robe-wearing guitar freaks who've taken the Earth template, pushed up the volume and the darkness, and delivered a terrifying mix of deep, deep drone and pure black metal. Vocals are few, but generally provided by creepy monster singers like Attila Csihar and Xasthur who howl and scream like the living dead. It's not always successful -I struggle to enjoy Black One- but on 2004's White2, I was enraptured. Three long, doom-laden tracks, the first an Earth-like guitar dirge, the second a weird droning experiment in deep, deep bass ambience and the last a weird experimental track that has to be heard to really be appreciated. All are long, all are dark and scary, but the sheer talent of the Sunn O))) guys and their various collaborators (over the years, they've worked with Oren Ambarchi, Dylan Carlson, Jesse Sykes, Boris and Julian Cope, among others) takes the music beyond puerile scare metal and makes it some of the most challenging and forward-thinking drone around.
And, I can't stress it enough, this music is dark. More than Schulze or the Taj Mahal Travellers, many modern drone artists are interested in exploring the relationship between their music and things like esoteric studies, ancient religions, shamanism and long-dead civilizations. The music channels notions of tarot, witchcraft, lost Gods and mythology, whilst, through the ability to create drone through a wide variety of means and instruments, always sounding fresh and modern. So the possibilities are boundless, and drone acts can increasingly be found at alternative and counter-cultural festivals, and not just experimental or metal ones. At the year's Equinox festival in London, I had the pelasure of viewing drone artist K11 and noise wizard Burial Hex, alongside such weird folk heathens as Kinit Her and Comus.

And the list is lengthy. As well as those robed legends of Sunn O))), and the increasingly primeval style Earth has been espousing (especially on 2005's Hex, or Printing in the Infernal Method, a windswept album of rhythmic drone metal that taps into America's deep dark well of far west occultism), we've had the likes of Robedoor (a sort of Sunn O)))-sounding metal/drone outfit), Pocahaunted (shamanic female duo mixing lethargic drumming, fuzzy guitars and ghostly chanting), massive doom-metal husband and wife duo Nadja (check out their titanic albums Skin Turns to Glass and Radiance of Shadows, the latter's sound being brilliantly evoked by the cover picture of gigantic snow-capped trees), Double Leopards (another dark and creepy duo whose Native American vibe evokes a sense of creepy marshes and dank forests, again demonstrating a link with dark-folk and occultism) or gloomy black metal-tinged slow rockers like Monno, TenHornedBeast and To Blacken The Pages (I recommend their A Semblance of Something Apertaining to Destruction most highly - it's a stirring slice of death music unequalled in darkness, emotion and beauty). All are dark, all love their drone, and explore its possibilities in very different ways (loud and heavy for Nadja, slow and gloomy for To Blacken the Pages, ghostly and folk-tinged for Double Leopards). And all have a deep understanding of drone's ability to evoke troubled internal emotions and a sense of long-lost esoteric culture.

A very recent act encapsulates the singular mix of modernity, ancestral power and raw power that makes up drone music: Urthona. Urthona is an enigmatic guitarist named Neil Mortimer based out in the wilds of England's Dartmoor, where he conjures up forceful drone on just a heavily treated electric guitar. The volume is insane, and at times has me thinking of some of the loudest and most brutal metal, noise or industrial music, all screaming machinery and modern detachment. But then he kicks in the deep end of his guitar buzz, going from scream to rumble, and suddenly your eyes are drawn to his album covers (he has two so far -in 6 months- "I Refute it Thus", released on Julian Cope's HeadHeritage label and this year's Amind Devonia's Alps). On them, our man poses in the distance, axe (that's guitar for the non-musical) in hand, surrounded by immense rock formations, be they man-made (on "I Refute it Thus") or natural (Amid Devonia's Alps). Machine, mankind, history and nature - all brought together by the drone. Surely that is the secret of this weird genre's enduring attraction and timeless allure.

Phew! What a slab! And I only barely touched on noise music! If that wasn't all too dull, here's a list of ten essential drone albums I think everyone should listen to if they have even a menial interest in the genre. I am sure you won't regret it. But what do I know?

1 - Cluster - Cluster 71 (1971)
2 - Tony Conrad and Faust - Outside the Dream Syndicate (1972)
3 - Klaus Schulze - Irrlicht (1972)
4 - LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela - Dream House 78:17 (1974)
5 - Takehisa Kosugi - Catch-Wave (1975)
6 - Earth - Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version (1993)
7 - Boris - Boris At Last - Feedbacker (2003)
8 - Sunn O))) - White2 (2004)
9 - Robedoor and Pocahaunted - Hunted Gathering (2007)
10 - To Blacken the Pages - A Semblance of Something Appertaining to Destruction (2008)

And some random noise albums for those of a less sensitive disposition:

1- Kaoru Abe / Yamazaki Hiroki Duo - Jazz Bed (1972)
2 - Lou Reed - Metal Machine Music (1975)
3 - Les Rallizes Denudes - Live 77 (recorded 77, released 1991)
4 - Nurse With Wound - Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979)
5 - Fushitsusha - Hisou (Pathetique) (1994)
6 - Mainliner - Mellow Out (1995)
7 - Wolf Eyes - Human Animal (2006)
8 - Burial Hex - Initiations (2008)
9 - Fuck Buttons - Street Horrrsing (2008)
10 - Sonic Youth featuring Mats Gustafson and Merzbow - Andre Sider Af Sonic Youth (2008)

Enjoy!!!! Come on people feel the noise!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And the drone, of course.

The Good, The Weird and The Fabulous - more movie magic!!

1) Salo o le 120 Giornate de Sodom / Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom - Pier Paolo Pasolini (Italy, 1975)

Salo is probably the nastiest, most revolting and controversial film ever made. Seriously, it's horrible. Vile. Cruel. Contemptuous of human sensitivity and emotions. A raging, seething polemic that appear to have only one purpose, which is to offend and alarm its audience.

Buuuuut, it's also a very -nay, amazingly- brave film, precisely for the reasons cited above. Pasolini had a beef with the established order of society, and by God was he gonna let society know. The premise, based on the writings of notorious French author Le Marquis de Sade, is simple: during the fall of Mussolini's Fascist Italy, a judge, a bishop, a politician and a duke -all symbols of the Old Authority- abduct 9 young men and 9 young women and take them to a grand old palace somewhere in the short-lived rump state of Salo. They hold them there and then proceed to inflict all manner of tortures on them, according to the rites of sex, shit and blood, as described in de Sade's writings and Dante's Inferno.

The scatology scenes were, for me, hardest to take. Watching all those young people being force-fed excrement and urine was beyond stomach-turning. In comparison, the sex scenes were almost amusing (though at no point erotic), and even the brutal final scenes of death and torture failed to quite shock my senses in the same way. But make no mistake, Salo is a harrowing and difficult experience. It is not a film I could really recommend to anyone.

But that's the thing: Salo is not there to be enjoyed. It's not "entertainment". Much like Haneke's Funny Games, it's a treatise, an essay. An attempt to look unflinchingly at what lies at the basic core of fascism: social dominance, violence and contempt for humanity. Pasolini depicts these traits with brutal honesty, because that was the best way to get the message across. And it was an important message for him, at a time when that dark shadow of Italy's recent past appeared to be looming again. He never saw the film's release: he was savagely murdered shortly before it came out. Some even think he was killed because of the film. I doubt it, but given the sheer audacity of Pasolini's cinematographic black sheep, it could almost be plausible.

2) The Brown Bunny - Vincent Gallo (USA, 2004)

I seem to be kicking off with a taste for the controversial. But if Salo was decried for the violence and depravity of its content, indie fave Vincent Gallo's second movie, The Brown Bunny, was loudly booed and jeered at its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival -reducing actress Chloe Sevigny to tears, reportedly- simply because it was a bad, pretentious film. Esteemed critic Roger Ebert even went so far as to call it the worst movie in the Festival's history. Ouch.

But, as Ebert himself acknowledged, when Gallo then went away and re-edited his film, he succeeded in transforming it, a gesture of humility quite startling in such an ego-driven industry. The result is a shorter, sharper and therefore more touching movie (having said that, I never saw the original, but I have heard descriptions of the missing footage, usually accompanied by the words "dull" and "empty").

It has to be said, though, that a lot of the criticisms directed at The Brown Bunny are deserved. It's pretentious. Self-indulgent and self-absorbed, with Gallo (writer, producer, editor, cameraman, director and main actor, no less) seemingly wallowing in his role as American indie cinema's romantic, troubled maverick. His obsession with trying to be "real" or "heartfelt" or whatever seems forced. Yet, somehow, the film works. The beautiful photography helps, as does the slow, mournful pace. The melancholic denouement -unexpected, harsh and touching- is a winner, and it had me staring blankly at my screen for a while after the credits had finished rolling. And, much as I dislike him, there is something stirring about Gallo's performance and those bright, intense blue eyes.

And the film is peppered with great scenes, little moments and touches that ultimately make the pretentious vanity project a cinematic gem. There are silences that mean everything, intense exchanges of stares and gazes between fellow lost souls, and one of the most riveting -and graphic- sex scenes I've ever scene, completely un-erotic, but traversed by a sense of raw urgency and barely suppressed violence that had me glued to the screen (no pun intended). Few films explore with such candour the ins and outs and contradictions of male heterosexual sexuality. Gallo may be vain, but he should be applauded for making such a brave, and ultimately honest, film.


3) Metropolis - Fritz Lang (Germany, 1927)

Quite possibly the greatest film of the silent age, Fritz Lang's Metropolis is flawless in so many ways. I'm not sure that I could ever do justic to its depth, scope, intensity and above all, to the breathtaking images that assault the senses at every turn.

It has to be said: we made our films pretty in them days. The absence of sound meant that directors had to compensate with elaborate props and visual effects to capture the minds of audiences and inspire them both mentally and emotionally. Examples like The Phantom of the Opera or The Phantom Carriage literally overflow with visual treats, such as ciaroscuro lighting or outlandish sets. And nowhere did they refine the art of visual poetry with such expertise as in Weimar Germany. With the shadows of World War I, and an increasingly desperate economic situation, looming long and hard over the German populace, directors externalized the nation's fears and doubts in ever more terrifying horror masterpieces, from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) to Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens (Friedrich Murnau, 1922), both cult and horror gems that will deserve my coming back to them at some point.

Metropolis topped them all, though. Inspired by Lang's visit to the towering skyscrapers of New York, it is the first true sci-fi movie, with breathtakingly inventive (and realistic, remember this is 1927 we're talking about - yet it honestly hasn't aged) sets, and a back-drop of class struggle, industrial monstrosity and fantastical horror. Metropolis is testament to Lang's vision, skill and artistry, and the fact that it has resonated so powerfully down the ages (even getting remade in cartoon fashion by Japanese Manga artist Rintaro) surely proves it deserves its place among the true masterpieces of the cinema.


4) Priscilla, Queen of the Desert - Stephan Elliott (Australia, 1994)

Soooo, a bit of fabulousness (is that even a word?) after all that depravity, raw sex and silence! Priscilla is the epitomy of the fun, heart-warming, outrageous cult comedies that are often staples of gay cinema, loved by straight audiences, but rarely done this well.

I mean, it's a film that couldn't possibly fail. Three drag queens (including one transexual) drive a bus overflowing with frocks, tiaras and boa scarves across the Australian desert en route to a show in Alice Springs. If you haven't already seen it, well, I'm sure you can still imagine the kind of scrapes, japes and adventures they get up to and into, form arguing with local rednecks, to dancing with Aborigenes, to watching a Thai "wife" launch ping pong balls from her nether regions.

Of course, it's camp, silly, over-the-top and chockablock with the kind of girly tunes that only us queers can love. I guess the word is "loveable", and after watching it the first time, I was very close to telling my parents that I intended to become a drag queen once I'd reached adulthood. But, beyond the costumes and the tunes, the main attraction of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is the star turn by veteran hardman Terence Stamp as Bernadette, the aforementioned tranny. He's simply astounding, stealing every scene with his/her dry witticisms and unflappable personality. Highlights include "Stop flexing your muscles, you useless sack of budgie turd!", "What are you telling me? This is an Abba turd?" and "Why don't you light your tampon and blow your box apart? 'Cos it's the only bang you're ever gonna get, sweetheart!" Simply hilarious, all the more so because you wouldn't expect cockney Tel to be interested in such a role. Instead, he carries every subtlety, every nuance across with perfect grace and poise, and he and his two (also straight) co-stars, the equally superb Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce, give extra depth and poignancy to characters that could have been mere caricatures.

So, if ever you fancy a laugh and a dance, there is no better way (apart from the Rocky Horror Picture Show) to glam up your cinematographic taste buds than Priscilla.


5) Blue Velvet - David Lynch (USA, 1986)

David Lynch is America's most enigmatic and curious director, and if I'm honest, one of the best. His output has been prodigious, and nearly every film he's delivered deserves "classic" status. They're usually odd, always troubling and never dull. Indeed, part of the entertainment value often comes from trying to figure out what the fuck is going on!

From Eraserhead to Lost Highway, Elephant Man to Mulholland Drive, all the way up to his most recent opus, Inland Empire, this visionary director, whose unique visual style surely owes much to his background as a painter, has beguiled, confused and enraptured audiences across the world, as testified by his continued success at festivals like Cannes. But, whilst all those films (and I would like to add the Palme d'Or-winning Wild at Heart to the list of Lynch treasures) are "must-sees", the ultimate laurel for best Lynch film has to go to Blue Velvet.

For one thing, it's hilarious, which is not an adjective one thinks of usually when assessing a David Lynch movie. Wild at Heart was also funny at times, but mostly Lynch's films are sober, grim and dark. And Blue Velvet is no exception, except that at times the director injects scenes with an almost Coen-esque sense of detached humour, whilst Dennis Hopper's portrayal as deranged psycho Frank is so over-the-top and insane as to elicit both fear and laughter.

And this dychotomy is at the centre of Blue Velvet's dynamic: it's a sly unveiling of the hidden shadows and dark corners that lurk under the pristine veneer of suburban America. The lawns may be immaculate, the houses bright and colourful, but deep underneath it all lies violence, corruption and sex. So Lynch toys with his all-American "heroes", clean-cut Kyle McLachlan and blonde beauty Laura Dern, before pitching them into the nightmarish underworld inhabited by Frank and his main victim, the stunning Isabella Rosselini.

Like all Lynch movies, Blue Velvet is hard to describe and impossible to summarise. But it's a sensory treasure and indeed assault, propelled by hallucinatory images and a deft use of sound, typical of this most esoteric and crafty of directors.


6) The Ascent - Larisa Shepitko (USSR, 1976)

Larisa Shepitko is now almost forgotten by most cinephiles, her untimely death in 1979 in a car wreck depriving the world of one of its greatest emerging directorial talents. As it is, we have The Ascent, a subtle and stirring masterpiece that won no less than The Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1977.

Recently, America's excellent Criterion DVD collection has re-released The Ascent, so this is an ideal opportunity for audiences to get acquainted with Shepitko's superb film. It is certainly long overdue, as, in my humble opinion, The Ascent is quite possibily the greatest Soviet film since The Battleship Potemkin, certainly at least as good as anything by the more lauded Tarkovsky (in fairness, though, I haven't seen all his films). It's depiction of two peasant soldiers who are captured and tortured by Nazi forces at the end of the Second World War is simple and understated, but from this basic storyline, Shepitko extracts a moving tale of betrayal and fear, but ultimately also of salvation and redemption. It may toe the Party line (as all Soviet films were expected to back then), but it does so subtly and intelligently, whilst never letting such preoccupations interfere with the profound and nuanced study of her character's psyches and frailties.

And all this is set to superb imagery. Shepitko's flawed heroes stumble through a bitter landscape of vast white snow and twisted black trees, ruined villages and dank, dark jails. As such, it is much more than an essay on human bravery and fragility, but also one of the most affecting war movies of all time. I recommend you snap this one up, as it would be a shame to see it go missing again.


7) Naked - Mike Leigh (UK, 1993)

Mike Leigh has delivered some of the most important and distinctive British films of recent years. His incomparable wit, dry sense of humour and dedication to exploring the subtle conflicts and challenges that pepper the daily lives of Britain's middle- and lower-classes are unique, whilst his penchant for letting his actors improvise their parts creates a strong atmosphere of unease and tension that simple visual tricks could never hope to replicate.

In this, Naked stands out even more than other triumphs such as Secrets and Lies or All or Nothing. It is dark, even by Leigh's standards, bleak even, with at its centre a sneering, almost-nihilistic, yet curiously eloquent Mancunien anti-hero named Johnny who pitches up at his ex-girlfriend's flat in London to spread a little chaos, and a massive dollop of sombre philosophy. Other characters slide in and out of the plot, as Johnny wanders the capital's dark and unwelcoming streets spouting his dubious wisdom, but he remains the core, the nexus of this strange and captivating film.

As such, Naked is essentially plotless. We follow Johnny's strange adventures and oblique conversations, none of which really "lead" anywhere. But don't let that make you think the film is dull. Far from it. It's a fascinating look into the minds and hearts of this world's lost souls, propelled by fantastic dialogue and deeply emotional character studies. Of course, the big star is David Thewlis as Johnny, whose mostly improvised ramblings and manic, disturbing energy had me hooked in every scene. I'm not aware of a more-deserved actor's prize at Cannes and am always stunned at the intensity of his performance. And credit to Leigh for letting it out, and for creating such an intelligent, thought-provoking and moving film, seemingly out of nowhere.


8) Elephant - Gus Van Sant (USA, 2003)

I will quite readily launch into massive hyperbole when discussing Elephant. It has the distinction of being a film that I was awaiting with baited breath long before its eventual release - and that didn't disappoint. In fact, it was yards, kilometres, miles, acres better than I could have ever hoped. I had long been a fan of Van Sant (despite the saccharine Good Will Hunting and the dubious Psycho remake), largely through my love of the seminal gay-themed indie, My Own Private Idaho, still one of my fave cult movies of all time.

And the premise behind Elephant hooked me from the moment I read a synopsis. An exploration of gun violence in Amercian schools, the film charts the gradual build-up towards a shooting in a vast Portland high school, seen through the eyes of a series of diverse teenagers, all of whom will be immeasurably affected by the upcoming tragedy.

Knowing the ending in this way imbues the entire project with an overwhelming sense of anxiety and fear. Which of these characters will survive? Why are these two boys so determined to commit such an atrocious crime? Van Sant refuses an analytical or over-dramatised approach. French magazine 'Les Cahiers du Cinema' described Elephant as "light", and the word is apt. The first two-thirds of the movie drift like the leaves that gather on the playground grass, or like the clouds that move across the Oregon sky above. We see Eli taking photos, John dealing with his drunk of a father, a gay-straight alliance meeting, a fat and ugly girl dealing with bullies, and a trio of skittish prom queens gossiping. Another guy meets his girlfriend for lunch. It's banal, but with Van Sant's permanently gliding camera, the improvised dialogue and eerie soundtrack, it takes on a dream-like, almost ghostly atmosphere. Knowing what we do about the ending, we end feeling like we're peering in at a building full of ghosts. It's a truly disquieting, and utterly unique, cinematographic experience. Van Sant would come close to replicating it in Last Days and Paranoid Park, but Elephant still stands alone as his greatest achievement to date.

Above all, his deliberate decision to not draw conclusions on why events unfold as they do is what gives the film its singular force. Van Sant touches on the reasons for the two boys' actions: detached, absent parents; loneliness; bullying; repressed sexuality; a violent culture; video games; Nazism - all theories put forwards after massacres like Columbine, but none ever feeling satisfactory. So we are left to contemplate the true reality - the loss, the fear and the pain. And the ultimate finality of what happens when teenagers run amok in their schools. It's troubling, and brave, and makes Elephant one of the greatest films ever made.


9) Reservoir Dogs - Quentin Tarantino (USA, 1992)

He's the coolest filmmaker on the planet, revered by millions, probably, and almost guaranteed to get tongues wagging and temperatures rising every time he announces a new film release. He's the king of geek movies, of video rental addicts, of cinephilia and cult references. And yet for all, there is always something that makes me pause for thought whenever I think of Quentin Tarantino. See, I can't shake the feeling that his first movie remains by far and away the best he's done so far. So, unless his latest offering -and darling of the current Cannes Film Festival- Inglorious Basterds proves to be a masterpiece, I think I'll stick to Reservoir Dogs. It's his grittiest, smartest and above all simplest film.

For, as great as Pulp Fiction et al were, there were just too many references, too many smart in-jokes or nods to Tarantino's vast cinematographic knowledge. So, despite the stunning dialogue and knack for hell-raising action scenes that he masters so well, I sometimes am left feeling a bit put off. Like he's trying too hard to be, well, cool.

Reservoir Dogs is cool without trying. It's gritty and basic and violent. It has the witty, irreverent and funny dialogue (see the opening diner scene where our Dogs discuss Madonna and tipping - pure genius). It has loads of bloody violence, so much so that it caused one hell of a stir upon release. And it has some of the most arresting screen performances ever scene in an American gangster flick, with Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi and Michael Madsen all shining. This is cinema at its stripped-down best: no frills, but lots of balls and attitude. And a razor-sharp script to boot. So, yeah, sue me. Reservoir Dogs is better than Pulp Fiction, better than Jackie Brown, better than Kill Bill. Both volumes. It's a landmark film, and I for one would love it if Quentin Tarantino revisited the sharp, brutal and hysterical simplicity he had in 1992.


10) Peppermint Candy - Leed Chang-Dong (South Korea, 2000)

Korean cinema has now become the thing to like in order to be a proper, middle-class trend-setter (or rather follower), so much so that French singer Renaud immortalised its influence in his song 'Les Bobos' (a massive crock of shit, but for other reasons than for his mockery of wannabe intellectuals like meself). Kim Ki-Duk and Park Chan-Wook have benefited most from this recent Western fervour, whilst Hong Sang-soo and Im Kwon-Taek have also toured the festival circuit.

A lot of this has to do with Korea's very Gallic approach to cultural preservation and promotion, with successive governments stipulating that a proportion of the national cinema industry's income had to go towards financing other Korean films. Likewise, cinemas were encouraged to screen as many locally-made movies as possible. This has created a fertile atmosphere for cinematographic creativity, as demonstrated by recent classics such as Old Boy, A Good Lawyer's Wife, 3-Iron and Woman is the Future of Man (all worth checking out).

And though he has been less prolific than the quartet mentioned above, Lee Chang-Dong deserves special mention in Korean cinema's recent revival, as he was, in the early "noughties", Minister for Culture in the Korean government, and was an aggressive promoter of this "cultural exception". And in Peppermint Candy, he has made the most moving and powerful contribution to his country's recent output.

Its scope is brilliant: a man's suicide sees us travelling further and further back through time, exploring the man's past, from his recent travails all the way back to the wide-eyed naivety of youth and young love. Yong-ho's life is intrinsically linked and intertwined with that of his country, so Peppermint Candy, as well as being a depply moving emotional journey, is also a grim and profound study of Korea's not-so-glorious recent past. War, police brutality and massacres slice into Yong-ho's life, turning it on its head, whilst he, like all Koreans, has to deal with the fall-out from the separation of the peninsula in two, and the subsequent isolation of North Korea. That event had a profound effect on the Korean psyche and although Peppermint Candy does not really address the separation directly, its shadow still hangs over all the event like a dark cloud.

Peppermint Candy is fascinating, sad, wistful and ultimately beautiful, the kind of mature, intelligent and ambitious film that we just don't see enough of these days, especially in the West. Lee Chang-Dong has returned to movie-making recently and on this evidence, we're very lucky!


11) The Innocents - Jack Clayton (UK, 1961)

Old-school horror at its brilliant best, Jack Clayton's The Innocents is a chill-lover's wet dream, a creepy and atmospheric black-and-white masterpiece, all repressed tension, dark shadows and hinted-at malice.

The Innocents is a far cry from the over-the-top violence, melodrama and rampant sexuality that characterised Britain's horror mainstay of the time, Hammer Films. Like most of their output, though, it's set in bygone days (Victorian England) and features a tried and tested horror archetype - the creepy old haunted house.

But The Innocents owes much more to the subdued, suggestive style of that most fruitful of 40s horror partnerships: producer Val lewton and director Jacques Tourneur. Together, they developped a deceptive, suspenseful style focusing on the clever use of shadow, off-screen violence and sound to create such bona fide horror classics such as Cat People, I walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man. All were big hits, especially the former, and left an indelible mark on horror history, influencing such greats as The Haunting and, more recently, The Others. And of course, The Innocents, in which the excellent Deborah Kerr plays a naive young governess who becomes convinced that the two angelic children in her care have been possessed by ghosts, as a terrifying man appears in a window and a shadowy figure walks the house and grounds.

But are these visions for real, or merely a figment of our governess' imagination? The film constantly plays on this ambiguity, with shadows and off-putting lighting heightening the sense of unreality and unease. Meanwhile, the governess' sexual frustration bubbles away under the surface, masterfully suggested by the devilish script and Clayton's adept direction.

That The Innocents continues to chill and frighten even 45+ years on demonstrates the power of Clayton's film. It's beautiful (kudos to Freddie Francis' stunning photography), sad and sombre, and it's suggestive atmosphere and shadowy sense of menace still function greater than a thousand shocks and groy outbursts ever could.

12) Chungking Express - Wong Kar-Wai (Hong Kong, 1994)

When Chungking Express first exploded onto the art-movie scene in 1994, it caused quite a stir, with Quentin Tarantino in particular singing Wong's praises to all who would listen. Though perhaps not a revolutionary step forwards in the same way that The Cabinet of Dr Caligari or Birth of a Nation or Gone with the Wind or A Bout de Souffle were, it certainly was a head-turner, and perhaps the first time since the French Nouvelle Vague that style and substance were married with such delirious panache.

"Delirious" is completely the right word, as Chungking Express is beyond frenetic, a neon head-rush that melds superb photography, a groovy soundtrack and sexy actors into a heady cocktail of modern, trendy cinema. It's script is simple and goes straight for the emotions, as a quartet of Hong Kong's cutest and hippest actors explore love, yearning and loss to the eerie back-drop of Hong Kong's never-resting activity.

Wong is famous for his rushed style, with the scripts using amounting to a mere paragraph and actors therefore encouraged to improvise around sets of ideas that change more or less every day. To make up for this "bare bones" approach, Wong roped in his favourite cinematographer, Australian Christopher Doyle, whose eclectic palette and stylish visual approach are at the core of this film. That and the music add bright, sensual flourishes to Wong's wistful script, so Chungking Express becomes not only a visually compelling experience, but a strangely touching one as well.

Wong would go on to refine and improve on his style with films like Fallen Angels and Happy Together (his masterpiece, in my book), but the starting point for one of modern cinema's most unique voices begins here.

13) Grey Gardens - Albert and David Maysles (USA, 1976)

A bit of a change here, as we delve into the world of feature documentaries. In this realm, the Maysles brothers have few peers, with their quiet, restrained approach and flawless respect for their subject matters paying massive dividends here in this touching portrait of two most peculiar women.

Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (aka "Big Edie") and her daughter "Little Edie" were relatives of one of the most prestigious and respected families in America, the Bouviers (of Jackie Kennedy fame). But, whilst her famous cousin earned adulation around the world, Big Edie ended up, for various reasons, secluding herself in her big East Hampton home with her daughter -a one-time wannabe dancer and actress who gave up her career to care for her aging mother- as her only real companion (apart from a rarely-appearing gardener and hoards of near-feral cats).

The Maysles brothers went to great lengths to get access to these two odd women after a news report highlighted the squalor that they were living, quite a scandal given their background. And their relationship is the most enlightening and impressive feature of this otherwise understated film, as decades of conflict, tension and love are exposed to the camera's discreet but omnipresent lens. Little Edie is particularly open, lamenting the career she gave up whilst preening and prancing for the camera and showing a begrudging love for her slightly loony mother. Big Edie, in comparison, is more guarded, but her moments of madness and her tantrums are cinema gold dust, and the pair's arguments swing from alarming to hilarious with speed.

Ultimately though, whilst the Beale women are infuriating, funny and perplexing, above all they are endearing. For all their arguments and bickering, their affection for one another is touching, and is given great room to be noticed by the brothers' quiet direction, with Albert and David deliberately keeping away from the camera's gaze to give full attention to their hostesses. It's a wonderfully honest and warm piece of cinema verite, and one worth re-discovering for any fans of slightly offbeat, weird cinema.

14) Wild Tigers I Have Known - Cam Archer (USA, 2006)

A decidedly odd and refreshing little-known gem here, from (then-) 25-year-old first-time director Cam Archer and based on his previous short. Youngster Malcolm Stumpf plays a lonely 13-year-old outsider who escapes from the bullying he receives and the indifference of his mother by delving into a fantasy world and by developing a quiet crush on an older, more self-confident boy.

Pretty standard fare for a gay-themed movie, really. Coming of age, unrequited love, raw sexuality, blah blah fucking blah... Except that Cam Archer's dreamlike style and his taste for the surreal take Wild Tigers... into quite different territory to your average Edge of Seventeen lookalike. It helps that Malcolm Stumpf is riveting as our "hero", Logan, convincingly by turns awkward, aloof and emotionally conflicted. With such a graceful central presence, Archer and his cinematographer Aaron Platt are able to weave a beautiful, oniric tapestry, as we dip in and out of Logan's reveries and feverish desires. The wild forests behind Logan's home, the swimming pool, his room: all become back-drops for some quite startling imagery, in a bold move by such a young director.

The boldest turn of all is the way Archer depicts Logan's furtive phone calls to Joey, his love interest. In order not to alarm or put off the older boy, Logan takes on a woman's voice, actually played by a woman (Logan's face is always obscured when he talks), as if to suggest that either all this is occuring in Logan's head or that, perhaps, Joey is equally attracted to him, but is surpressing the attraction by imagining he is dealing with an actual woman. It's a clever ambiguity that Archer handles masterfully, making the ending all the more effective.

Wild Tigers I have Known will never attract widespread attention and will remain a gay niche film. But if you are willing to overlook it's slight flaws and give it a go, it's well worth tracking down. With a great soundtrack, superb performances and beautiful cinematography, it's a great advert for American independent films.

15) Punishment Park - Peter Watkins (UK/USA, 1971)

Let's end on a political, hard-hitting note. Because, although Barack Obama has sailed into the White House bringing hope for a better, fairer future for the entire planet, the shadows of the Bush years, with their tentative totalitarianism echoing the worst aspects of the Nixon administration, still linger menacingly. As such, whilst Paranoid Park should be an archival film, relevant only to historians and collectors, it instead still seems frighteningly important and cautionary, nearly 40 years after the end of the Vietnam War that served as its back-drop ended.

British director Peter Watkins depicts an alternative 1970, in which anti-war protestors are, instead of going to jail, offered the chance to race unarmed through the desert (in a military zone known as "Punishment Park") to an American flag. If they get there, they can go free. If the army catches them, they go to jail. Watkins features as a documentary crew leader who follows a group of prisoners as they attempt to make it to the flag. Quickly, however, they realise that the army have no intention of letting them reach the flag, instead unleashing a series of harrowing attacks on the protestor, made all the more troubling by the film's faux-documentary style.

Watkins' agenda is clear from the off, as the protestors are pitted against a heartless conservative machine in the form of dummy trials and intimidation. Then they are sent into the 45-degree desert heat with no food or water, as tensions bubble to the surface and the army closes in. At the end of the film, another trial is underway and another set of young people are faced with a choice between prison and the Punishment Park. It's fiercely political, hard-hitting and sobering. Predictably, it was massively controversial on release, especially in America.

Watkins' political pamphleteering will probably not be to everyone's taste, but there can be no denying the force and intensity of Punishment Park. It's brutal, gritty and harsh, and whilst it can be construed as exaggerated or hyperbolic, the truth is that, with the Kent State Massacre occuring just prior to its filming, and with the unpleasant realities of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo bay fresh in our modern-day minds, it's actually not that far from reality, even in 2009. Scary stuff...