Film on the Radio

21 Jan 2020

Drawing Restraint 9 – Transcript

CARLA: Hello and welcome, I’m Carla Donnelly and this is Film on the Radio – your weekly deep dive into the scores and soundtracks of the films you love. Or for today probably a score you’ve never heard of but will find super interesting. Thanks again to This Australian Life for bringing us in we love hearing these intimate stories from our community.

Film on the Radio has been a special commission for the new summer grid here at Joy. The summer grid has run from early December and will finish in just under 2 weeks. That means there will be 8 episodes of Film on the Radio in total. Our back catalogue is available where you listen to your podcasts. There’s a wide variety of soundtracks and scores in there – we’ve done Boogie Nights, Home Alone, Phantom Thread and Under the Skin… last week we dove deep on the score to the Black Mirror episode San Junipero, which is one that is really close to my heart. Watch it if you haven’t already.

And with an 8 week stint I did try to choose scores that are really close to my heart. Who knows when I’ll do this show again and I have a spreadsheet of over 50 films I would like to do an episode on, so it was a tough process choosing which ones to cover. There’s been some really popular work in there like Reality Bites and some really challenging work in there too like Under the Skin. Today we’re going to listen to what I think is one of the most interesting and possible challenging scores – Drawing Restraint 9 by Bjork.

As mentioned previously its really difficult to get to gender parity with presenting a show about soundtracks and scores as this arena is mostly populated by men – but of course with a little digging, and some creative thinking, I came up with many not so obvious options to talk about.

Bjork was in a relationship with fellow artist Matthew Barney for 13 years. They had a child. The relationship featured in much of her work – the music box, choral and harp delicacies of Vespertine, written while they were falling in love. The album made entirely of human voices – Medulla, written after being pregnant and giving birth, and this is the point that this score falls into. In 2005 – despite protesting that they would never collaborate artistically – Barney and Bjork starred together in his art film Drawing Restraint 9, with Bjork composing all the music. This is not the first foray into film music work for Bjork – in 2000 she wrote the music for Dancer in the Dark, the Lars von Trier film.

If you’re unfamiliar with the work of Matthew Barney he is a sculptor… athlete… visual artist… he is most well-known for his Cremaster films, which are a series of five feature-length films, together with related sculptures, photographs, drawings, and artist’s books. Films filled with symbolism, mostly surrounding creation, birth, fecundity, masculinity, femininity. They are obtuse, obscure and filled with striking imagery… sometimes grotesque… sometimes beautiful but always compelling.

Drawing Restraint 9 was the first film outside of the Cremaster series that Barney made. This synopsis is from Wikipedia:

“Drawing Restraint 9 is a 2005 film project by visual artist Matthew Barney consisting of a feature-length film, large-scale sculptures, photographs, drawings, and books. The Drawing Restraint series consists of 19 numbered components and related materials. Some episodes are videos, others sculptural installations or drawings. Barney created Drawing Restraint 1-6 while still an undergraduate at Yale University and completed Drawing Restraint 16 in 2007 at London’s Serpentine Gallery. With a soundtrack composed by Bjork, Drawing Restraint 9 is an unconventional love story set in Japan. The narrative structure is built upon themes such as the Shinto religion, the tea ceremony, the history of whaling, and the supplantation of blubber with refined petroleum for oil.

The film primarily takes place aboard the Japanese factory whaling vessel, the Nisshin Maru, in the Sea of Japan, as it makes its annual journey to Antarctica. Two storylines occur simultaneously on the vessel: one on deck and one beneath. The narrative on deck involves the process of casting a 25-ton petroleum jelly sculpture (one of Barney’s signature materials), which rivals the scale of a whale. Below deck, the two main characters participate as guests in a tea ceremony, where they are formally engaged after arriving on the ship as strangers. As the film progresses, the guests go through an emotional and physical transformation slowly transfiguring from land mammals into sea mammals, as they fall in love. The petroleum jelly sculpture simultaneously passes through changing states, from warm to cool, and from the architectural back to the primordial. The dual narratives, the sculptural and the romantic, come to reflect one another until the climactic point at which they become completely mutual.”

Let’s dive into some tracks, here’s Gratitude and Ambergris March. After these tracks I’ll go into explaining the lyrics and instrumentation as there are some fascinating behind the scenes things to learn. You’re on Joy.

MUSIC: Gratitude – Bjork, Ambergris March – Bjork

CARLA: You’re on Joy 94.9 and this is Film on the Radio. Your weekly deep dive into the scores and soundtracks that you love. This week, however, we’re covering a relatively unknown score to the art film Drawing Restraint 9 by Matthew Barney. The score is composed by his then wife and co-star Bjork. As you can hear from those previous tracks the instrumentation is unusual, this much you can expect from Bjork. The first track “Gratitude” is all harp, glockenspiel and a children’s choir with lyrics sung by Will Oldham. The second track was Ambergris March which is one of my favourites also featuring the glockenspiel but also the crotales which is this incredible sounding instrument that are arranged like a xylophone but are little cymbals that sound like bells (they’re called antique cymbals, and versions of these as finger cymbals date back all the way to ancient Egypt). I just think the sound of it is so amazing. Especially paired with the glockenspiel and harpsichord in that track. Here’s the crotales in a simpler composition so you can really hear their sound.

CLIP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGrAwQnZ6Bs

CARLA: That was master percussionist Tom Teasley with part of his composition “Reflections” demonstrating the crotale – I’ll link to that You Tube clip in the show notes and on our website. That’s where you can find the links to all the research used in each episode.

Usually I like to play the trailer to the film to give you some context and backstory, but this film has no dialogue so it’s kind of pointless. What I will play you is a couple of clips of interviews on the set of Drawing Restraint 9. There was a documentary made by Alison Chernick of the creation of the work. Here’s some audio of Bjork discussing the film and the creation of the score:

CLIP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj-d4fltrFE , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDRx2gPDmVM

CARLA: That was Bjork discussing some of her process behind scoring the 2005 film Drawing Restraint 9. Set in Japan on the only in-service whaling vessel the Nisshin Maru. For this project Björk traveled to Japan to study ancient Japanese music. Several tracks are made with the sound of the shō, a Japanese instrument which contains 16 various reeds; the shō performances are from Mayumi Miyata, one of the world’s greatest shō players. She also appears in the film, playing her instrument. This again in my white western mind is such an unusual sounding instrument. Here is Mayumi on the track Shiminawa, composed by Bjork.

MUSIC: Shimenawa – Bjork, Bath – Bjork

CARLA: You’re on Joy 94.9 and this is Film on the Radio. Each week we dive deep into a soundtrack or score, dedicating the whole hour to it. Most we have covered would be familiar to you, dear listener, however today’s you might not have heard of. Drawing Restraint 9 is a 2005 feature length art film by multi-disciplinary artist Matthew Barney. And the score is composed by his then wife Bjork.

Bjork, undoubtedly genius of our times and total music obsessive, spent time researching Japanese instruments, music and performance styles for this piece. The film is set upon the Japanese whaling ship the Nisshin Maru. We’ve discussed her compositions for the Japanese reed instrument the sho… which is just fascinating. I’ll link in the show notes so you can see but it basically looks like a cluster of small bamboo pipes, think a handheld size, curved pipe organ that has a single mouthpiece. And it really sounds like, it sounds like a pneumatic pipe organ… due to the breath manipulation. From Wikipedia “It consists of 17 slender bamboo pipes, each of which is fitted in its base with a metal free reed. Two of the pipes are silent.

The instrument’s sound is said to imitate the call of a phoenix, and it is for this reason that the two silent pipes of the shō are kept—as an aesthetic element, making two symmetrical “wings”. Similar to the Chinese sheng, the pipes are tuned carefully with a drop of a dense resinous wax preparation containing fine lead shot. As (breath) moisture collected in the shō’s pipes prevents it from sounding, performers can be seen warming the instrument over a small charcoal brazier or electric burner when they are not playing. The instrument produces sound when the player’s breath is inhaled or exhaled, allowing long periods of uninterrupted play. The shō is one of the three primary woodwind instruments used in gagaku, Japan’s imperial court music.”

I love this instrument! Mayumi Miyata was the performer on the score and is considered the worlds best sho player. Bjork in New York magazine: “The short deadlines imposed by working on Barney’s film were intimidating, she says, “but it turned out to actually be healthy for me to not be so decadent.” And the result doesn’t sound hurried at all—it sounds languorous. One entire suite features the ancient Japanese instrument the sho, an element Björk added after she Googled around, searching for “something about this project I was ignorant of.”

“I just took the train out to Montauk on my own and sat there in a hotel and wrote the sho pieces in the space of a week,” Björk says. She then recruited the instrument’s virtuoso, Mayumi Miyata, to perform them. “I listened to everything she had done, and it encouraged me to do the opposite,” she explains. “I was wary of the Japanese stereotypes, and I didn’t want it to sound like some New Age meditation CD.”

Was it hard to write music for an instrument she hadn’t heard of a month previously? She answers simply, “Challenging.”

“I want closeness, and I want contact,” she explains. “I want a middle. And that was one of the fun things about doing this project: There is no middle. I’m a ‘narrative, narrative, narrative’ kind of character, and Matthew is a ‘no narrative, no narrative, no narrative’ kind of person. I knew from the beginning that we had opposite views, and the challenge was to unite them and prove that they’re the same thing.”

Let’s listen to more of Miyumi Miyata’s sho performance Drawing Restraint 9 score. This track is called “Pearl” – it is played at the point in the film where Japanese pearl divers smear each other in grease, preparing to go out. Pearl divers are all women in Japan, traditionally and their higher body fat enabled them to survive better in the freezing temperatures. From Runnersworld.com “There are about 2,000 “Ama” left in Japan—female pearl divers who plunge unaided to the bottom of the ocean 100 to 150 times a day, holding their breath for up to two minutes at a time while swimming vigorously to collect pearls and food. The profession is an ancient one, mentioned in texts almost 2,000 years ago, and even 60 years ago there were more than 15,000 Ama.

The physiology of pearl diving is amazing, thanks to the body’s intricate response to the sensation of diving. When your body detects a lack of breathing and cold water on the face, a series of automatic responses kick in, constricting your blood vessels, increasing your blood pressure, and causing your heart rate to drop. While diving, pearl divers often see their heart rate drop to half its resting value—even though they’re swimming hard.”

So, it makes sense that this track only features the Japanese sho and throat singing. I find once you relax into the sho music it takes you on a journey. You’re on Joy.

MUSIC: Pearl – Bjork, Storm – Bjork

CARLA: This is Film on the Radio and you’re on Joy! Today we’re discussing Bjork’s score to the 2005 art film Drawing Restraint 9. That may be why you recognized that track as Bjork but couldn’t place the album that it was from. That track was called “Storm” and before that was the very out-there “Pearl” featuring the Japanese sho and throat singing by Tanya Tagaq.

Film on the Radio has been a summer grid presentation on Joy, with only 8 shows. This is our 7th so our last one is next week, and we’ll be covering the film and tv work of Sia. I still haven’t constructed this show so if you have some favourite Sia tracks from film and television please get in touch. You can reach out on Twitter and Facebook @filmontheradio or email us at filmontheradio@joy.org.au. I have loved presenting this series so much and I hope to do it another time this year. It’s been a delicate balancing act for me on highlighting female composers, covering queer content, queer composers and incorporating things like the holiday season. I hope you have enjoyed this series! Please reach out if you have any suggestions of how it can be improved or what you have loved about it.

Admittedly I’ve played some really challenging things, todays score is not easy… nor was Under the Skin… but I’ve also tempered it with really popular soundtracks like Boogie Nights and Reality Bites… Hopefully you’ve discovered some new music, instruments or knowledge about the creation of soundtracks along the way.

We still have more to go on Drawing Restraint 9 today, if I’ve piqued your interest it’s definitely one to seek out. Matthew Barney is super interesting as an artist as well so if you’ve been introduced today check out his work. He and Bjork were in a relationship for 13 years. The album Vespertine was about them falling in love, Medulla about the process of being pregnant and finally reclaiming your body… Drawing Restraint 9 their art film together… and finally the excruciating Vulnicura about his cheating on her and breaking up their marriage and 2017’s Utopia with Bjork on the other side dating again and receptive to the world in an ecstatic way. It’s difficult for me to engage in her earlier work now that features Barney knowing how badly he hurt her…

Now I could try and explain the plot of Drawing Restraint 9 but it’s an exercise in futility as it’s an art-film… its mostly symbolic, imagery based and up to interpretation. I can say the imagery is stunning but over 2 hours long it’s a slow-moving feast…

As keen listeners know I love ending on a bit of film trivia but there seems to be little documented. I guess the main thing I want to get across is Bjork’s authorship. She is someone who has had her production, arrangement and composition always applied to any man who is also on the project. Bjork will be noted as one of the greatest composers and arrangers of our generation. She is genuinely a Maestro. She also plays the harp and does so on this score (along with the flute and many other instruments).

I’ll leave you on a couple of tracks from the score – Cetacea which features my fave the crotales and Hunter Vessel. Hunter Vessel may be recognizable to Bjork fans as it was later reused on the album Volta, on the tracks Vertebrae by Vertebrae and Declare Independence. The last track I’ll play is Bjork in a much better place post Barney break up – a track from Utopia called Blissing Me… about the joys of texting new loves and pashing.

Thanks for listening this week and sticking in there! Coming up next is Triple Bi-Pass one of my favourite shows on Joy! See you next week!

MUSIC: Cetacea – Bjork, Hunter Vessel – Bjork