New Theme to Still at Large

New Theme to Still at Large by The Creeping Things

5.1 channel sound work with single screen video, full version 11 mins, 2015.

Still at Large was a film essay about Holy Island, northern England, presented by architecture writer Nicholas Still and directed by Paul Rooney. The online film was ‘hacked’ by The Creeping Things (aka Lola de Witte-Still of Berwick-upon-Tweed and Berlin aka Paul Rooney), who re-edited her own version, adding  a new musical soundtrack. Over de Witte-Still’s relentless motorik beat and analogue synths, the mysterious female voice on the soundtrack speaks – with an almost maternal pity and exaltation – of a disturbing male figure on the run from an unspoken crime, who is, in turn, on a hunt for something or someone. Is the figure Nicholas Still’s alter ego on a quest to redeem his own childhood memories, memories of his boyhood visits to the area with his mother? Why does the narrator seem to take pleasure in the figure’s pain?

The comforting template of the TV architecture programme is obliterated, at least sonically, by a musical possession that refuses to bow to the authority of the presenter’s image or authorship, to his ‘coherent’ reading of the landscape and it’s histories, proposing instead an eruption of a different story, a repressed, messy and difficult story of comedy, instability and fear. Thanks to Lola de Witte-Still, Richard Stephenson Winter and Melanie Dagg. Commissioned by Berwick Visual Arts for Berwick Film Media & Arts Festival.

A stereo, remixed version of the work, New Theme to Still at Large by The Creeping Things, is released as a single on Owd Scrat Records.

 

FVU recommends (Film and Video Umbrella website). Summer 2020.

Aidan Dunne (Irish Times). 15/2/2020 preview of the work.

“The Creeping Things. This is a compulsive, thrilling, unnerving track… it’s powerful stuff.” Verity Sharp, Late Junction (BBC Radio 3). 22/5/2018 radio broadcast of the work.

“New from the Owd Scrat label which is I think rapidly challenging Kythibong as my favourite label in the world… They’ve got a couple of new releases that are fantastic, one of them’s that one, The Creeping Things.” Mark Whitby (Dandelion Radio). May 2018 radio broadcast of the work.

“…it’ s produced by The Creeping Things, it’s a soundtrack produced for a film, as an alternative soundtrack to the one that’s actually there…” Roger Hill, PMS (BBC Radio Merseyside). 12/3/2018 radio broadcast of the work.

Chris Sharratt (A-N website). 30/9/2015 review of the work.

Steve Rose (The Guardian). 18/9/2015 preview of the work.

Mark Moran (Picture Ville website). 18/9/2015 preview of the work.

Claire Dupree (Narc magazine). 18/9/2015 preview of the work.

Charlotte Keeys (Little White Lies website). 14/9/2015 article referencing the work.

“…a short, beautiful and disturbing film…” David Whetstone (The Journal). 26/9/2015 review of the work.

Berwick Film and Media Fest, Ahoy! (The Crack magazine). Sept. 2015 article referencing the work.