Glasgow Film Festival 2011: The Music Strand

Gigs are conducted on stages in music venues; films are shown in cinemas. In its third year, the Glasgow Music and Film Festival takes such received wisdom and junks it: films will be shown here, there and everywhere; gigs will take place in swimming pools; bands and audiences will co-exist without hierarchy. When a performance by horror soundtrack icons Goblin constitutes the most conventional show in a line-up, it’s best to take a razor to your expectations and orthodoxies.

Admittedly, some prospects are more straightforward than others. If you caught their set of John Carpenter themes last year, ‘Zombie Zombie Score Battleship Potemkin’ (23 Feb, The Arches) will be self-explanatory, though no less tantalising for it. Fresh scores to 70s hippie sci-fi Silent Running and the rarely-seen Spanish-language adaptation of Dracula (filmed concurrently with the Bela Lugosi version in 1931 using the same sets) are also in the offing, the former handed over to intense noiseniks 65daysofstatic (19-20 Feb, The Arches) and the latter accompanied by Gary Lucas’ solo guitar work (21 Feb, O2 ABC).

The Memory Band will cover songs from The Wicker Man with the help of Fence Collective's Johnny Lynch (24 Feb, The Arches), while Ennio Morricone is paid tribute in Mondo Morricone: a multi-artist collaboration led by Davie Scott of the Pearlfishers and Duglas T. Stewart of BMX Bandits (26 Feb, The Arches). And of course there’s Goblin: coaxed out of a thirty-two year retirement in 2009, the Italian prog-masters – best known for their work with Giallo maestro Dario Argento on genre classics Suspiria, Profondo Rosso and Tenebrae – are sure to impress with their idiosyncratic sound, by now so indelibly linked to scenes of slaughter in the minds of aficionados that it’s essentially auricular gore (25 Feb, The Arches).

A more tenuous union of music and film takes place at North Woodside Leisure Centre: Wet Sounds’ “cinema of the ear”. One sound system will be placed above the water, another beneath the surface, with each playing independently and heard separately depending upon the individual listener’s degree of submergence. Eric La Casa, Adrian Moore and Joel Cahen provide the sounds; you supply the trunks (20 Feb).

Then there’s No Boundaries, No Hierarchies with Los Angelean avant-garde electro duo Lucky Dragons (22 Feb, The Arches). Organised in conjunction with local promoters Cry Parrot, the event comes with an adventurous remit: attendees are encouraged to submit short silent films in advance, with the promise that all will be used on the night. Conceived by Cry Parrot founder Fielding Hope as an explicit challenge to the conventional gig experience’s “cold, detached” divide between audience and performer, it cedes control of both music and film to the crowd. With interaction and participation its keywords – properties rarely associated with either medium – it’s a bold experiment worth getting involved in.

Finally, the National Youth Orchestra are staging an inter-disciplinary amalgamation of film, photography, animation, sound design, theatre and live performance, with ‘Vanishing Boundaries’ as the organising theme (21 Feb, The Arches). Getting a clearer idea of how such a combination works probably involves buying a ticket and heading along – advice worth applying liberally across the festival’s line-up.