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    Wind, waves and weather for 40.000 locations worldwide. Any time, any where! For kitesurfers,...

Blast of Silence (1961)
Blast of Silence (1961)
1961 | Crime, Drama, Thriller
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"One of my favorite mini-genres is the B crime movie from the late fifties and early sixties. It was a unique period in American cinema that gave birth to these half-cocked, no-budget movies that were made by some visionary filmmakers. They’re all super raw and gritty, very existential, and absolutely innovative in technique. It’s no wonder that the French New Wave filmmakers all discovered them and ripped them off (I’m looking at you, Jean-Pierre Melville). Movies like Don Siegel’s The Lineup and Irving Lerner’s Murder by Contract (both of which have popped up on the new Criterion Channel recently!) embody this subgenre, but the high point for me is Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence, which seems to grow in stature every year. It’s hard to describe it. Imagine if Orson Welles was a crazed junkie on the Bowery in the late 1950s and somehow conned someone out of $20k to make a bleak movie about a hit man. It’s sorta part Point Blank, part Taxi Driver, part Shadows, and it’s as hardboiled as they come. It’s also one of the great New York City movies, with amazing time-capsule photography in all the boroughs and near pristine documentary coverage of streets. The Criterion disc also unearthed another absolute gem: a 1990 documentary in which Baron visits all the locations from the film. Oh, and the Criterion cover art, by comic artist Sean Phillips, is maybe my favorite cover! And the edition also includes a graphic novel based on the film! (Damn, should I have put this first?)"

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"This record was 1958 and it was already a 25-year retrospective so that means it spans from 1932/3 to 1958! It came to me at the same time as all this new wave stuff and I was really interested in all the stuff Cage was doing with prepared piano, and there’s a bunch of prepared piano on my new record. Between those pieces and orchestral works for multiple players where Cage was using people banging on metal break drums and stuff, it was really sounding like the gamelan music I was listening to at the same time and I just found it to be super inventive. John Cage was defining a new way of thinking about music in the 20th century and in a way his definition included all of noise and all of ambient sound and all of these things that became movements for us in the 20th century, like Eno’s whole discreet music and ambient thing; or noise music from extreme harsh Japanese noise to whatever we called Neubaten or what Sonic Youth were doing, if you called that noise music; or the Boredoms or Merzbow which is more extreme, there’s no singing, there’s no guitars, it’s just harsh noise – this music opened the door for all that stuff. It’s amazing music in it’s own right, and yet some of it also explores really low volume like super quiet aspects of music where background sounds and people coughing – well that’s part of what you’re hearing in the experience too. So I felt like that record is so important that it defined a gargantuan giant of the 20th Century, which is John Cage, but it defined all these different bits of music that even if people later didn’t realise their music stemmed from that, in some way it did. Everything from 60s onwards, no matter what you were doing outside of rock & roll there was some kind of influence from Cage there."

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