To one of the world’s leading experts in Lou Reed y The Velvet Underground we have it at home: it is the seasoned ‘rock critic’ Ignacio Julià, that this weekend in New York he presented his new and succulent book on the saga, written in English, ‘Linger on’, as well as the movie ‘Velvet Suite’ Manuel Huerga. This is a film that includes the performance that, last April, Lee Ranaldo (former Sonic Youth guitarist) and Pascal Comelade offered in Banyoles, the town where Julià lives and where he presented the book for the first time.
‘Velvet suite’ has not been screened in any room in the country for now, nor is it expected to do so in the short term, although Huerga reveals to me that they are advanced conversations with Filmin to incorporate it into the platform sooner rather than later, perhaps this very month of February.
We hope so, since it includes an unprecedented association, Ranaldo-Comelade, and is in itself a magnetic audiovisual piece with the recognizable invoice of the man who back in the 80s was the director of the TV3 program ‘Arsenal’.
It is a 38-minute film, as long as that ‘performance’ lasted in which Ranaldo, a magician of ‘noise’, measured himself against the electrical forces of nature using his guitars and the bow used as a nod to John Cale, and Comelade took oil out of the grand piano and the toy piano. Convulsive improvisation and sequences in which the couple, assisted by the percussion of Ramon Prats, end up at pleasure in various pieces from the ‘velvet’ catalogue, beginning with ‘All tomorrow’s parties’, continuing with ‘I’m waiting for the man’ and ‘Femme fatale’ and concluding with ‘The ocean’. Film dedicated to the memory of producer Hal Willner and our great druid Pau Riba.
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In ‘Velvet suite’ there are vestiges of that ‘Arsenal’ aesthetic, beginning with the severe black and white. Huerga merges images of the concert and the rehearsal, all shot in separate sequence-shots with a single camera, and insert fragments of ‘Nomad’, the film that a twenty-something Julià filmed in Super-8, with flashes of characters worthy of the ‘Warholian’ Factory. Material that in New York has been savored before here, in a packed Roxy cinema, attended by Lee Ranaldo and other musicians, such as Ira Kaplan, from Yo La Tengo.
What the book and the film by Catalans about an iconic New York artist is present in New York and arouse interest there, in the lion’s den, it is not something that is within everyone’s reach. Mental scope, even: the first and the most difficult to transcend.
