Film Screening of "Texas Trip: A Carnival of Ghosts" and Live Performance by Attic Ted

FILM: “You can’t wear the disguise when you look in the mirror.”

Attic Ted, Virginia Black and Mother Fakhir are performing, making strange sounds, and remembering songs of a dark past, while Gretta is at home, distracting herself, hiding from reality. Zombies! Ghosts! Freaks! “Drive-in mutants, sick, disgusting, who believe in blood, in breasts and in beasts”. This generation of Americans, conceived by their parents in the back seat of a Chevy on a night out at the local drive-in, bottle-fed with images of exploitation cinema, monsters, and fear, are now fighting against social norms and a “life of feudalistic servitude”. Isolation, back to the wilderness, meet these brilliant musicians, fed up with the hypocrisy of capitalism’s melody, experimenting with their identity, with abstract ideas through the materiality of their own body and flesh, to the extreme.

Directorial duo Maxime Lachaud and Steve Balestreri’s beguiling debut feature is a societal portrait of underground and alternative artists, creating noise music and primal masks. A “pre-apocalyptic Lynchian urban exploration”. A psychedelic journey in abandoned parking lots, destroyed marquees, and their washed-out silver screens, once places of cultural madness. Empty theatres, and people wearing masks… Sounds familiar. TEXAS TRIP almost seems prophetic. Even more so it is a haunting anthropologic work, as subverted as it is cathartic.

PERFORMANCE: Attic Ted
Attic Ted plays weirdo cabaret post art-punk synth country carnival music, with masks, from Texas... since 2002... utilizing old Hammond organ bass and Casio rhythm loops, while playing electric guitar, Korg synth, clarinet and vocals.