I Just Read About That…

[WATCHED: 2011 and November 24, 2012] Wurld [CST069] (2010).

Wurld is an art installation.  It was created by Emi Honda and Jordan McKenzie, the co-founders of Elfin Saddle.   As the Constellation Records website explains it:

Wurld is a year-long installation piece constructed, tended and developed in their Montreal apartment, using stop-motion video to document the evolution of the sculptural elements of the work as well as to enact various animated sequences as part of a larger narrative arc for the piece. The resulting 23 minute film Wurld premiered at the Vienna Film Festival in 2009.

The film is indeed, a stop motion film of the daily growth of the plant life in the garden.  It’s got several awesome sequences where you can watch the vines spin around looking for something to grab onto.  But beyond that, they have also created an entire world in this little world.  Things move along train tracks, smoke (cotton) comes out of chimneys, objects exit caves and construct sculptures of themselves.  There’s even an occasional live snail (how did they get it to go where they wanted?  It’s very cool.

Accompanying the video is a soundtrack by Elfin Saddle.  Elfin Saddle plays a kind of world music–accordion, bells, bowed saws and Japanese-style melodies from Honda.  Although in the case of the soundtrack, there are no vocals, and the music is much more soundtracky–not really any style, just a kind of ambient soundscape.  Some of the music is very dark, which comes across especially with some of the found instrumentation (the percussion sounds more like found metal than cymbals or bells).  And some of the other percussive sounds seem to be more like blocks of found wood.  It’s interesting that the music by itself is kind of dark since the video is not dark at all, it is filled with wonder and delight.  Until the end bit which is very mechanized and seems to show a definite downturn in the society of their world.

The DVD comes with a whole bunch of extras:

“Flora and Fauna” films the installation as it is being set up. It’s six minutes of camera pans around the beautiful growing environment  There are close-ups and last minutes fixes to their massive sculpture, which ran from February March 2005 in Vancouver.  It’s especially cool because all of the sounds are from the piece itself.  And as the camera pans around to different aspects of the sculpture you can see that what’s making every noise in the room/  You can see that things are moving–many things on turntables with cool sculptures spinning around them, sometimes hitting glasses at varying tones.  There’s other turntables playing scratchy noises, and objects clattering in cages.  There’s also accordion music coming from somewhere.  It’s all very cool.

In Rotating Sculpture, the cameras captures a giant turntable as it revolves very slowly.  We get to see all of the minute details included in this magnificent piece–the thousands and thousands of broken parts that comprise this interesting wurld.  It’s all set to a slow dirge like song that is very catchy (that would be “A Sinking Celebration”)

In “Wurld Extras,” there’s a deleted scenes section that shows different scenes from the film that were cut.  There’s a different take on the opening mounds of dirt.  which has a every cool sequence of what looks like rotating moving dirt.  There’s even some cool mechanized sections.  And my favorite is a scene in which a mushroom grows overnight.  It is very cool.   The deleted scenes almost bring a more pleasant feel to the movie (there’s even another snail).  And the final deleted scene is very cool because we see all of the plants grow and then watch them kind of slump when it starts to rain.

Incidentally, the packaging of this set is really beautiful, coming in cardboard sleeve with cutouts so you can see (and rearrange) the pictures underneath).  Honda and McKenzie did the art for it as well, and it’s beautiful.  There’s a simple DVD and a 10″ vinyl (that comes with the DVD as well).  Constellation makes beautiful art.  And so do Elfin Saddle.