Sight Unseen Presents Artist, Luke Fowler
78 minutes
Director: Luke Fowler
Q&A with artist Luke Fowler following the films.
The Way Out
2003 • UK • 33 MIN
THE WAY OUT profiles Xentos “Fray Bentos” Jones, one of the founding members of The Homosexuals, a band that lapsed into obscurity after self-releasing a number of groundbreaking records in the post-punk period. Although The Homosexuals disbanded without ever releasing an authorised LP, L Voag (aka Xentos) released his own solo project, The Way Out, in 1979. The Way Out was a cut-up DIY concept album that imagined its musical context situated in an inverted parallel universe where pop music is made by Modernist, Serialist composers and the avant-garde is left to those on the fringes of acceptance. Amos (aka Xentos) continued to produce and distribute a mass of diverse tape projects throughout the 80’s on his own label, Its War Boys, spanning most known and unknown musical genres, under a myriad of multiple identities. THE WAY OUT interweaves new interviews, scripted scenes, found and filmed footage with unearthed Super 8 films by Xentos himself.
Electro-Pythagorus: A Portrait of Martin Bartlett
2017 • UK, Canada • 45 MIN
With Electro-Pythagorus: A Portrait of Martin Bartlett Luke Fowler pays tribute to the work and musical ideas of Martin Bartlett (1939-93) a proudly gay Canadian composer who during the 1970s and 1980s pioneered the use of the ‘microcomputer’. Bartlett is hardly recognised, never mind canonised, in cultural life. He researched intimate relationships with technology and was particularly interested in handmade electronics where, as he states in one of his performances: “the intimacy of handcraftedness softens the technological anonymity creating individual difference making each instrument a topography of uncertainties with which we become acquainted through practice.”
ABOUT
Luke Fowler (b. 1978, Glasgow) is an artist, filmmaker and musician based in Glasgow. His work explores the limits and conventions of biographical and documentary filmmaking, and has often been compared to the British Free Cinema of the 1950s. Working with archival footage, photography and sound, Fowler’s filmic montages create portraits of intriguing, counter cultural figures, including Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing and English composer Cornelius Cardew.
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