the Cult of New Core

DUTCH HARBOR Unalaska, a group of islands stretchting out into the Bering sea west of Alaska. Only a few hundred miles further to the west lies Siberia. On one of the last islands there is a small village called Dutch harbor, it's one of the most remote outposts of western cilivisation. It's cold out there. The Unalaskan islands are small mountainrange sticking out of an immense sea surrounding the islands on all sides. People live there. Quite a lot of people actually, considering the climate and the way it seems to be cut off from the rest of the world. They live there because they like it out there. This is the setting of the documentary called 'Dutch harbor', it's a 16 millimeter film made by Braden King and Laura Moya. Shot in very grainy black and white, almost all by carrying the camera around and trying to soak up the suroundings just observing and taking in everything. This documentary recently got shown here in Holland in the Effenaar in Eindhoven, accompanied by a band called The Boxhead Ensemble, an ever shifting collective of musicians who have also made the soundtrack to the documentary. The soundtrack is one of the sparsest records released this year, easily competing with the most minimalistic Finnish Techno. Why am I telling you all this? Well, everything about this project is illustrative for the attitude towards experimental and instrumental music in the United States at the moment and especially around Chicago. A scene I've extensively told about in the last two Cults of New Core. This project and the Boxhead Ensemble mostly contain people who come from around Chicago, like Jim O'Rourke (Gastr del Sol), Will Oldham (Palace), Rick Rizzo (Eleventh Dream Day), David Grubbs (Gastr del Sol) and Joseph Ferguson (Rachel's). Why would anyone want to live in one of the most remote and harshest places on earth? What can you do out there? And how did it become the place it is. These are the questions that get asked during the documentary. The makers do that by just showing the way it looks, what people do out there and by showing the remainders of the past. No heads talking, just the images and people telling about it and the improvised music of the Boxhead ensemble. Unalaska was once, just like the rest of America, owned by native Americans. The native people living on this Unalaskan range of islands were called Aleuths, but as soon as Americans discovered that there was even money to be made from such a remote place, they came by the thousands and even took this place away from them. The sea around Unalaska contains crab, tons of it, and that's what is caught there, crab, by the shipload. Since the start of the century people have come to Dutch harbour to make money, and especially during the second world war, these islands were an important strategic point to the Alliance. This is something the Japanese also knew and not long after Pearl harbour they did also attack Dutch harbor. That was the only time Dutch harbor really got hit during the war. The true disaster happened after the war. Dutch harbor became civilized. This is the main theme of the documentary. The fact that civilization took away the essence of the way it was out there. But at the same time, it embraces the fact the place is no longer the wilderness it was. One of the best moments during the film is a young female artist telling about the first moment she set foot on an island near Dutch harbor. She came there by plane, she was very young, only eightteen and until then she had lived with her parents in the suburbs. But on advice from a friend she went to Dutch harbor to learn more about herself. The plane landed on a strip that was supposed to be an airport, and she told that the first things she was amazed about were the colors. Everything was so brown, with a bits of grey and white of the snow and ice and the greys of the sky, she loved it! Because she didn't know what to expect, she had forgotten to dress the way you ought to when travelling as North as this. So she stepped into the 'Airport' which was more like a big gardenshed and in there there were a great number of men, all bearded, all looking scruffy and all looking in her direction, all thinking the exact same thing. That was the last moment she thought about going back, but she didn't, she stayed. Right after that she says she was most amazed about the fact nature and industrylization seem to be in such harmony here. On one hand you have the water all around, the mountains with only white virgin snow and then you have all these boats, the harbour, the trucks, the people and in a way it seems right. The fact there is so much industrial activity there doesn't seem to make it wrong, it makes the picture complete. Like the place, the documentary is in perfect harmony, the subject it describes fits exactly into the form chosen, the grainy way it looks, the way it just shows. The people telling about their lives out there make the pictures come to life and the music takes you there. The soundtrack to the picture already does that on its own, you don't need to see the picture to experience what Dutch harbor is about. The silence out there is on record, the people telling their story can be heard in the instruments slowly sketching the landscape, the people living there, the things they do, the thoughts they have. There's only one parallel I can see to this picture and this record, "The Solitude Trilogy", three radio documentaries by Glenn Gould also describing remote and solitary places out of and also in civilization. In the same way as these three documentaries 'Dutch harbor' can make you long for a place that isn't attractive in anyway except because of loneliness itself. And being alone doesn't seem that bad in a society that is becoming ever more crowded and hectic. Dutch harbor has already become different from the way described in the documentary, it is changing fast, even a remote place like this becomes civilized, just like any other place on earth. The way a former Crab Fishermen Buck Rogers says it at the end of the soundtrack: "This place was neat ten years ago, because it was different. The statement in Alaska Magazine said it all: 'The domestication of Dutch harbor'. It was the last place to go." Go on. Visit it on record. Joep Vermaat