Originally commissioned in 2015, GoGo Penguin resurrected their original score for Godfrey Reggio’s cult film Koyaanisqatsi for one fascinating night at the Dome. With the progressive jazz trio playing live to the film, it was a rare and artful performance, unlikely to be repeated any time soon.

An opening fade from black was accompanied by an ominous screeching takeoff on the bass. The first suite flew over rock formations and sand dunes, and saw the band’s tone move from tense to ponderous, to breezy and uplifting, and finally to majestic as the footage switched from landscape to sky and back again. For anyone who hasn’t seen the film, it’s amazing footage, of the world and humans in it. The truly stunning shots of landscapes, and moments of human life captured, helped to give it an impact which has in no way been dulled with time.

There were parts of the score where GoGo Penguin had matched the music to the film frame by frame – glitchy drum breaks matched visual snags; basslines spanning many octaves expressed cluttered, busy images; keys swelled in floods or faded in drips. It was a remarkable marriage of vision and sound on a microscopically detailed scale. Across the film as a whole, meanwhile, the band mimicked exactly the use of image. A scene might change but a certain pattern or motif be repeated, so that the film moved on while remaining interconnected – so the band would change the song but continue a certain melody, dotting recurring sounds throughout the film so that the music morphed slowly and continuously, evolving rather than jarring.

As the footage progressed from natural landscape shots to include cities and humans, the film and music became progressively more intense. Images of humankind’s destructive works on the world were reflected with crashing blows of genuinely foreboding effect. As the film moved onto picturing the scale of humanity’s domination of their environment – endless cityscapes, concrete wastelands, endlessly repetitive industrial acts – and the depiction of humans began to take on a distinctly robotic aspect, the band were able to come into their own. They have repeatedly expressed an interest in automata, with pianist Chris Illingworth saying of their last album, “[Man Made Object] is partly inspired by my fascination with ideas of robotics, transhumanism and human augmentation. We’re recreating electronic music on acoustic instruments. It’s like a man-made object that has become humanised.” The reasons they chose this particular film, and their enjoyment in continuing to explore this concept through it, became more evident as the film wore on: by speeding up footage faster and faster of mass-human activity, the film-makers made automata out of people – and GoGo Penguin eagerly followed, fitting in their gut-wrenching rhythmic interplays and breathtaking finger-speed. Eventually, over the course of a crescendo which built for as long as 30 minutes, you had to wonder at their stamina, as well as their ingenuity.

Their score was often violent, frequently sensitive, always able to instil wonder or horror in a way faithful to the film. The original itself is stunning in any case, but this was a truly remarkable experience. They would have written a great score to this anyway – but what made it so complete was that the GoGo Penguin electro/acoustic sensibility obviously resonated with this film. The idea they may never tour it again seems faintly tragic.

Ben Noble

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