FEATURING THREE EPISODES:
‘GEOGRAPHIC MUSIC’/GLASGOW
‘HAPNA’/STOCKHOLM
‘ISLAJA’/FONAL
Tolbooth Attic
Sunday 25 May, 3.30pm
One Day Pass
Three Day Festival Pass
Following on from the success of last year when we screened two episodes of This Is Our Music, we couldn’t help but notice how closely episodes from this series relate to the programming of this year’s Le Weekend. So we’re very pleased to continue our association with this incredible modern-day archive of underground music.
This Is Our Music was born when Swedish MTV decided they should be the ones discovering the new music rather than reacting to other media, especially other parts of the MTV network. So they invited Swedish journalist, Andres Lokko and a couple of others, including his partner, Lisa Milberg, to put forward a proposal for a series of programmes.
Thinking that there was no chance that they’d get the commission, Lokko and colleagues put forward the idea of This Is Our Music, which would document all these important scenes, labels and groups, almost all of which were completely off MTV’s radar. Amazingly, MTV decided to go ahead and commissioned first one, then two subsequent series, which even now, half a decade later, seem like an incredible, unlikely archive of underground music.
Series 1, which includes the Geographic Music / Glasgow episode is slightly less realised than some of the later episodes but features The Pastels, Teenage Fanclub, Future Pilot AKA and Bill Wells. The Hapna / Stockholm episode is also from Series 1, while the final episode which we are screening, Islaja / Fonal, is from Series 3.
Although Islaja is not participating in this year’s Le Weekend, she is an amazing musician and the episode shows off This Is Our Music’s casual brilliance with beautiful camera work and a loose sense of structure which makes every episode individualistic and often very much in the image of the subject. Watch Islaja and you’ll get a real sense of this.
Other episodes take in Maher Shalal Hash Baz; Tennniscoats; Josephine Foster; Mike Alway and El, and the Animal Collective to name a few. Hopefully a box set of this magical series can’t be too far away!
(Sweden 2002, 2003, 2004, 30 minutes per episode).
le weekend festival, Tolbooth, Stirling, 23, 24, 25 May 2008
