Collision, a local smash hit

Unsurprising spoiler alert: Collision ends with a crash. Darting back and forth through the memories of sad-eyed office drone Michael (Scott Marcus), this recent short film from director and producer team Nick Matthews and David Ngo attempts to recreate the split-second emotional and psychological epiphanies of a traumatic motor accident.

That isn’t to say the film is part of a subtle, arty new road safety campaign (though it’s stark, slow motion money shots of breaking glass are certainly indebted to the genre). Rather than a cautionary tale against inattentive steering, Collision riffs on the grey isolation of dense, inner-city living and feelings of disconnect and numbness which colour the relationships blooming within its confines.

“The seed of the story came a week after we’d met up in Sydney,” Ngo explains. “We knew each other from other projects but both had a ‘dirty secret’, Nick wanted to move into directing and I wanted to produce.” Career aspirations aside, the encounter also brought another common thread to light. “That night we both spoke about our experiences of pretty bad car accidents. I had a nasty one overseas ten years ago. I was thrown out of a vehicle and had to be resuscitated, which is what happens in the film,” Matthews said. A week later, Ngo had completed a ‘spine of an idea’. “The basic story of a relationship and a car accident and how that can inform your memories of other parts of your life” he recalls. While the titular catastrophe bookends the film, its nucleus (or dare I say, heart) lies with Michael’s dalliance with manic-pixie-dream-girl type Mia (Kathryn Beck).

Matthews explains “The accident itself incites the story, but it’s really about the relationship and its breakdown. The experience of a really dangerous situation and what happens psychologically in a bad relationship, there’s a definite parallel between the two.”

While concrete jungles and dense, modern city environments have provided vibrant settings to countless films past, from Chungking Express to Ghostbusters, Collision exploits the urban potential of Adelaide in surprising ways. While much of the film lingers on the melancholic overtones of Michael’s existence, in many ways the film also serves as a love letter to that very environment, with the Adelaide CBD and Chinatown providing a vivid, bittersweet backdrop to the twin wrecks of his life.

“A lot of people are surprised when they asked where it’s filmed, most didn’t know it was possible to create an ‘urban tale’ in Adelaide,” recounts Matthews. “It’s not that we’ve dressed up the city in a way that doesn’t represent it, just by being selective we’ve used areas that have a density and a texture to them, and Chinatown is a big part of that aesthetic. It’s partly the faces and the people too. A lot of the cast were cast from the Exeter and around the street, not actors just great faces and real characters who felt like part of the fabric of the city.”

Screened in Adelaide earlier this year, the South Australian production recently won a place in the 60th Melbourne International Film Festival, making it technically eligible for Oscar nomination, an exciting string of words for any film maker. “Melbourne’s considered the most prestigious of the Australian festivals, with the most international interest,” Ngo explains.

Even for filmmakers a decade into their careers, the local industry is to some degree one of constant reinvention, learning and proving oneself. “A film like this is definitely a festival film, proof of our new roles more than our film making skills,” Ngo continues. “Nick’s been a cinematographer and I’ve been an editor for a long time, but this film has seen us stepping into different chairs (director and producer) for the first time, basically the Film Corp gave us some money to test whether we could do it.” Following Collision, the pair have managed to snaffle some funding courtesy of FILMLAB, currently embarking on a creepy-looking new feature collaboration in 2012, One Eyed Girl.

Article originally appeared in a mock-up Student Election edition for On Dit Volume 80.

The Sea Thieves

Led by the clawhammer guitar playing and whispered vocals of songwriter Zac Coligan, Adelaide collective The Sea Thieves are steeped in the quiet-folk tradition of Nick Drake and the lo-fi, swoon-inducing charm of Bill Callahan and M. Ward.

Formed years ago as a recording project by Coligan and wife Naomi Thompson, the pair made used some downtime from live performance to chart a new, weird and wonderful musical direction with an experimental EP under the appropriately warm and wooly name of ‘Eiderdown’. With its fondness for ukulele, looped drums and strange spoken word samples, ‘Summer of the Red Wolf’ laid the groundwork for what would eventually become The Sea Thieves. Boasting tracks like ‘The Eve of Acid Rain’ and ‘Shadow of My Hand’, it also honed their knack for evocative song titles.

On record The Sea Thieves’ music positively bristles with odd sounds. It creaks and crackles as if every instrument were an eccentric geriatric prising themselves from a rocking chair to tell the children another yarn.  Always ones for unconventional instruments, the band often opt for dusty toy pianos, wheezing accordion and most famously (relatively speaking) the singing saw to augment their sound.

Not content to popularise just the singing saw amongst the Adelaide scene, they’ve recently made use of a strange device known as an Optigan (portmanteau of Optical and Organ).  An electric keyboard produced by Mattel in 1970, the Optigan works by triggering samples of pre-recorded instruments through some kind of disc based mechanism that a simple History major like myself cannot hope to fathom. Needless to say, in both description and execution it sounds pretty cool.

Whereas their sparse 2007 full-length ‘Hiding In The Shade’ was defined by a sense of solitude, recorded and performed almost solely by Naomi and Zac, the new record ‘They Will Run’ bears a strong sense of community. With the assistance of Arts SA the pair reunited with many of their former bandmates who escaped to Melbourne at the turn of the century, including producer/guitarist Jed Palmer and cellist Zoe Barry. With these co-conspirators the rapidly expanding outfit added muted group harmonies and all sorts of strings, percussion and front parlour piano to what are undoubtedly some of the pair’s most effortlessly pristine songs yet.

Of course Coligan and Thomspon are also mainstays of the Adelaide scene through their propriety of the Jade Monkey, that lovely, dimly lit little venue off Rundle Mall with retro furniture, bright green walls and fairy lights to boot. It’s from the other side of the bar that Zac has been able to accrue much of the band’s current lineup, gradually drafting some of the more talented musicians to grace his stage to his own project over the years, including violinist/guitarist Tom Spall (Doe, Leader Cheetah) and drummer Aiden Moyse (Hawks of Alba, Curses, Bad Girls of the Bible). Although assembled after the recording of ‘They Will Run’, this new live configuration has given the band new legs, adding a robust under current (and rich harmonies) to the material that gives the Sea Thieves as degree of live grandeur that matches the charm of their recordings. Make it a priority, dear reader, to experience both.

Originally published in On Dit Magazine 79.6

Hawks of Alba

A good few years ago there lived an Adelaide band called Bad Girls of the Bible. Having played a slightly harder-edged, grunge-inflected brand of indie rock than that currently found on many of our local stages, the band dispersed to pursue some fairly eclectic new projects. Frontman Dan Pash fused with the remnants of dance-punk trio Pharaohs to form, of all, things, an alt-country band called Leader Cheetah, while others embraced low-end sounds in the twin-bass, instrumental attack of Swords. Rhythm section Sarah Masters and Aidan Moyse, however, absconded northwards.

Miles away in the frigid yet warm embrace of a reportedly vibrant Glaswegian music scene the pair made their way as a two piece under the name ‘Running With Horses’. Terrible weather aside, living and playing in Scotland proved to be something of a defining experience for Moyse and Masters. Far from falling victim to frostbite, excessive whiskey consumption or the ever-present danger of the “Glasgow kiss”, the pair found a great deal of support from Scottish audiences, receiving airplay on BBC Scotland and landing a spot on the country’s biggest annual music festival T In The Park.

Upon the expiration of their visas the duo returned to Adelaide’s creative womb and enlisted new collaborator, guitarist and current Adelaide Psychology student Hannah Fairlamb for their current guise. “Hawks of Alba is a natural progression from Running With Horses,” Moyse explains. “Our music has always been a bit poppy, but we just do whatever interests us. Although we do have our sweet moments, but it’s also pretty growly; some of new stuff is quite dirgy too. Since Hannah joined the band, and Sarah moved from guitar back to bass (what she used to play in Bad Girls of the Bible) we’ve just been enjoying noise we can make!”

Hawks of Alba’s sound harks back to the kind of sedate and occasionally fuzzy 90s pop you’d associate with hazy memories of Saturday morning Recovery. Their songs offer pleasantly sharp pop hooks delivered in girl-boy-girl vocal harmonies reminiscent of The Breeders and at a stretch Lash (remember them?) and live Moyse is known to play drums and glockenspiel at the same time. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that only months after their return the band quickly floated to the top of the local broth to be promptly scooped up by Triple J Unearthed, winning a Big Day Out slot and an enviable amount of national airplay from the youth broadcaster.

Despite having played in outfits for much of the decade, Hawks of Alba and their respective members haven’t released a whole lot, which makes rumours of an EP a particularly exciting prospect. According to Moyse the record, designated for July or August release sees the warm self-produced recordings of their early radio hits paired with new material and remixed by correspondence with Portland, Oregon resident Larry Crane, a fellow responsible for the gritty sheen in releases by Sleater-Kinney, M. Ward and the late Elliott Smith.

Recommended if you like: Magic Dirt, Vivian Girls, Evan Dando and Smudge.

Originally in On Dit Magazine Issue 79.2