Evening's Civil Twilight In Empires Of Tin (Constellation Records)

According to the notes printed inside the typically sumptuous heavy card-stock packaging for this, the Constellation label's first ever DVD release, "Evening's Civil Twilight" is a scientific term for the precise time when sunset gives way to night. But here, over the course of 100 grainy impressionistic minutes, the phrase is applied instead to passing empires, both historic and contemporary, as this multi-layered film from directorJem Cohen, with live musical accompaniment from a host of Constellation luminaries, meditates on the parallels between the decline of the 19th century Austro-Hungarian empire and the putative twilight of the current American one. The DVD documents the performance at the 2007 Vienna International Film Festival ofJem Cohen's multi-media work, inspired by Austrian author Joseph Roth's epic inter-war novel "The Radetsky March", a long-standing favourite of Efrim Menuck, Silver Mt. Zion's de facto head honcho, who originally passed the book on to the director. In front of a giant screen projection of Cohen's grainy, half-lit, black and white images, culled from archive footage of the Habsburg era and WWI and shot on atmospheric 16mm film in contemporary Brooklyn and Vienna, a massed musical ensemble, collecting together members of Silver Mt. Zion (née Godspeed You! Black Emperor) along with singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt, Guy Picciotto of Fugazi and Brooklyn duo The Quavers, provides a loosely orchestrated soundtrack to these socio-political musings. As the camera roves from the projection screen showing of Cohen's film, via long-shots of the stage and audience, to intimate close-ups of the musicians at work, they play a variety of pieces, ranging from the improvised textual abstractions that begin the performance, through impassioned full-blown ensemble reinterpretations of Vic Chesnutt's heartfelt songs and The Quavers' extended field-recording paean to their Brooklyn hometown, to the final storming blow-out rendition of Richard Strauss' "Radetsky March" that finishes the show. While the abstract, meditative nature of Cohen's film may be difficult to convey on the small home screen, this DVD certainly does its best to capture the full context of the Viennese performance, interweaving the projected images with the musical accompaniment, which, with some wonderfully passionate and superbly realised high-points, is undoubtedly the strongest aspect of the show.

'Evening's Civil Twilight In Empires Of Tin' is available now on Constellation Records.