Monday 21 March 2016

INTERVIEW with filmmaker Gordon Raphael

I was playing synthesizer in Mental Mannequin-a New Wave band during the punk scene in Seattle's golden history.
i've been writing songs for my entire life, 2000 so far - but nobody has taken me out for an expensive dinner to offer me the record deal I've always been dreaming about.  so I decided to incorporate snippets of about 12 different songs in the form of an ill conceived, plotless homemade film which I called "First Scratching's of Light"

After four decades of borrowing friends equipment, tweaking out with outer space sounds, self-indulgent chemical highs, and finally a couple of fairly successful rehabs – the trap door sprang open! (Bhudda and Jesus later told me that the trap door had been a semi-solid creation of my own mental state) 

I was led by the hand via a trail of rock 'n' roll music to New York, London, Liverpool, Berlin, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The scenes for my film are simply visions taken from these musical free flying days-
arranged without chronological concern, edited crudely by myself – and then given a final layer of filmic gloss by Graeme Maguire. 

I want to thank Moses and Ben for inviting me to live and work in Berlin, Miss Machine for taking me on tour of England with them- and New York City, which for me. for a long time was the actual "city of dreams".