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Original music by DDAMAGE and HELIOGABALE.

dDamage is a duet driven by two brothers. Since 2001, they're connected with labels such as Angelika Khlermann, Active Suspension, big dada, Quatermass, Tsunami-Addiction, to name a few... Then came their third LP on Mike Paradinas' legendary label : Planet-Mu. Wait ! They play a very energic electronic music, with some hip-hop influences, churning wild guitar riffs, furious samples and analogical synth noises. BLAST!

HELIOGABALE

Heliogabale started in 1992. Influence back then : Sonic Youth/Birthday Party/Silverfish. After ten years of indie involvement, Heliogabale released Diving Rooms in 2004, where the guitars have obviously kicked off the sampler. Self-produced and recorded in Paris, it shows in a perfect way the electrical, luminous and visionary aspect of the band.

“If it’s not transgressive, it’s not underground. It has to be threatening the status quo by doing something surprising, not just imitating what’s been done before.”
Nick Zedd

The Cinema of Transgression is a term coined by Nick Zedd in 1985 to describe a New York City based underground film movement, consisting of a loose-knit group of like-minded artists using shock value and humor in their work. Key players in this movement were Nick Zedd, Casandra Stark, Tommy Turner, Richard Kern and Lydia Lunch, who in the late 1970s and mid 1980s began to make very low budget films using cheap 8 mm cameras.
An important essay outlining Zedd's philosophy on the Cinema of Transgression is the Cinema of Transgression Manifesto, published pseudonymously in the Underground Film Bulletin (1984-90).
Perhaps the most famous transgressive artist, Richard Kern, began making films in New York with actors Nick Zedd and Lung Leg. Some of them were videos for artists like the Butthole Surfers and Sonic Youth.

We who have violated the laws, commands and duties of the avant-garde; i.e. to bore, tranquilize and obfuscate through a fluke process dictated by practical convenience stand guilty as charged. We openly renounce and reject the entrenched academic snobbery which erected a monument to laziness known as structuralism and proceeded to lock out those filmmakers who possesed the vision to see through this charade.
We refuse to take their easy approach to cinematic creativity; an approach which ruined the underground of the sixties when the scourge of the film school took over. Legitimising every mindless manifestation of sloppy movie making undertaken by a generation of misled film students, the dreary media arts centres and geriatic cinema critics have totally ignored the exhilarating accomplishments of those in our rank - such underground invisibles as Zedd, Kern, Turner, Klemann, DeLanda, Eros and Mare, and DirectArt Ltd, a new generation of filmmakers daring to rip out of the stifling straight jackets of film theory in a direct attack on every value system known to man.
There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined. None shall emerge unscathed.

Deathtripping focuses on the post-punk New York filmmakers that coalesced around the radical manifesto by downtown filmmaker Nick Zedd and explores in depth Zedd's demand for a cinema from which "none shall emerge unscathed."

Contextualising the work of these filmmakers within the wider underground film and downtown post-punk no wave scenes, Deathtripping offers detailed analysis of the extreme, cult films produced by this loose knit movement, alongside interviews with infamous and legendary filmmakers including Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, Tommy Turner, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Beth B and Cassandra Stark, and their collaborators Lydia Lunch, Joe Coleman, David Wojnarowicz, and Lung Leg.

It contains:

. A brief history of underground/ trash cinema

. Discussions of seminal influences such as Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, George and Mike Kuchar

. Interviews with key film-makers, such as Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, Cassandra Start, Beth B, Tommy Turner, plus associates such as Joe Coleman, Lydia Lunch and Lung Leg.

. Notes and essays on transgressive cinema, philosophy of transgression, manifestos. Film index, bibliography