Guillaume the Weird Human Jukebox and other delights

Guillaume the Weird Human Jukebox and other delights
Originally uploaded by MonkeyGone2.

This picture shows one of the many wonderful sights (no sound alas) from the final evening of Cinema Nova's 10th anniversary celebrations. Guillaume, an engaging young man who I had previously known only as a bartender at Recyclart, entertains the crowd with his 'Weird Human Jukebox' show. Customers choose songs from a list of 166 tracks that Guillaume has memorized by tapping the song number into a calculator and paying the requisite 20 cents (10 cents for Beatles songs) through the slot of the barricaded ticket booth. He then plays whatever they have paid for, from Bert Jansch to Jacques Brel, Johnny Hallyday to Sun Ra (I plumped for 'Space is the Place', performed with a gusto not heard since Edward Barton years).
Inside the cinema itself, the evening began with Pierre Bastien and his Mecanium (a mechanical orchestra made of lego), soundtracking a movie by Dutchman Karel Doing. After a short break and a beer, we returned for Spaceheads (Andy Diagram and Dick Harrison, former cohorts in the ten-years-ahead-of-their-time Manchester alt pop combo, Dislocation Dance), with visuals from London-based filmmaker Greg Pope.
Spaceheads, who play a kind of dirty jazz electrobeat that occasionally touches on John Hassell or Miles Davis (circa Tutu) territory, but always remains defiantly itself, distinctly other, battled British train chaos to get to the show. And we were glad they did. As Andy Diagram mixed live trumpet loops (including basslines created by tuning his instrument down two octaves) with Dick Harrison's upright yet fluid and very funky drumming, Greg Pope took a drill to the celluloid spooling through the projector, to create a series of scratches on the film stock that, together with the powerful music, made for a very psychedelic and fittingly experimental, yet accessible, end to a fine evening.