Electric Purgatory

KPFT Radio Interview with MO

noemail@electricpurgatory.com — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 02:00:00 GMT

Mo from KPFT 90.1 Houston, TX interviews director Raymond Gayle about the film and the state of Black Music.
Director Raymond Gayle is candid with his views on why black audiences fail to support a genre their ancestors helped to create. ROCK MUSIC. This interview took place in March of 2007 as part of the Objectif Radio Hour with Mo. Click the link below to listen to the interview. For more information go to Objectif Magazine.

http://www.mydatabus.com/public/Objectif/electricpurgatory.wav

23-Mar-07 9:00 PM

Against the Grain, Outside the Box, and Up in Heaven

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 16:00:00 GMT

By Colette Gaiter Photos: Trish D. Motolinia Consider the term “black rocker” in reference to a musician. It seems like an oxymoron. Black musicians do not play rock and roll, or so the cultural myth goes. Raymond Gayle’s film Electric Purgatory--the Fate of the Black Rocker breaks through those myths with the same intensity as the music itself--driving, relentless, and full of passion. Combining interviews and sequences from live performances, the film tells a visual story we have never seen about music we should have heard, but probably have not. In the first weeks of January 2007, the innovative hip-hop group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five became the first rappers to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Many soul and R&B artists, such as Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, are long-standing members. Rock and roll has expanded its boundaries again. Late twentieth century music and current popular music have constantly evolved into new forms,...

7-Feb-07 10:00 AM

Monki's Second Communique From The Turks and Caicos International Film Festival!!

noemail@electricpurgatory.com — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Greetings humans, Monki here with an update from the Turks and Caicos International Film Festival. Things are going great here on this beautiful island; the people are laid back, the ocean is beautiful and the rum punch is flowing. I'm sure Moriarty would enjoy the sand and sun much more so than his damp lair out in California. I'll toast my next drink to you Mori.

Thursday's movies all fit together quite well. They all complimented each other nicely. I began with two films dealing with the hip-hop culture, followed by an intriguing look into the African-American rock and roll scene and then capped it off with a voyeuristic look at the last days of a megastar's life.

I started off my morning with "DJ Drama's Respect the Game." This was a peek into the world of Southern rap music from Atlanta to Houston and back. The movie discussed issues ranging from royalties, to drugs, to cars, to airtime and others.

Read the rest of this article at Ain't it Cool News.

23-Oct-06 9:00 AM

KPFT Interview

noemail@electricpurgatory.com — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 01:00:00 GMT

Click here to listen to an interview by KPFT Pacifica Houston.

8-Sep-06 8:00 PM

Festival takes its films seriously

noemail@electricpurgatory.com — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Fourteen-year-old Jared Eveillard is an articulate kid with mouth full of braces, a cellphone, and a part-time job. The aspiring actor -- who paid his way into an actors workshop taught by film and TV star Michael Beach -- woke up at 7 a.m. on this summer day, took in a McDonalds breakfast, and went through his monologue, over and over. Beach, the former ``ER and ``Third Watch star and Roxbury native, was impressed with Eveillards short performance as Cory in August Wilsons play ``Fences. Beach wanted Eveillard to recreate the part, but not before giving Eveillard directions on thinking about the characters disposition. Later, Beach said, Eveillard ``was able to respond to the coaching, and that tells you a lot about where he could possibly go as an actor. The actors workshop was part of the eighth annual Roxbury Film Festival, held last week on the campuses of Northeastern University and Wentworth Institute of Technology. The festival featured the work of local filmmakers like...

6-Aug-06 9:00 AM

Electric Purgatory: The Fate of the Black Rocker

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 14:00:00 GMT

S.F. Black Film Fest

(Documentary)

By DENNIS HARVEY

A Payback production. Produced by Marc Newsome. Executive producer, Raymond Gayle. Directed, edited by Raymond Gayle.

With: Fishbone, God Forbid, Doug Pinnick, Cody ChesnuTT, 24-7 Spyz, Burnt Sugar, Vernon Reid, Adam Falcon, Jimi Hazel, Sara Hill, Greg Tate.

Why is rock music -- descended from African-American blues and R&B -- an almost exclusively white terrain today shunned by hip-hop-focused black audiences? These and related issues are explored to intriguing if only partly satisfying ends in Raymond Gayle's documentary "Electric Purgatory." Routinely assembled, episodic mix of talking-head interviews and concert clips surrenders too much screentime to interviewees whining about the presumably race-biased corporate music biz. Still, the subject's fascination for music buffs makes it viable for DVD release and possible broadcast sales.

After recapping blues progenitors and successful early black rock 'n' rollers (including performance footage of Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Jimi Hendrix), pic notes a widening gap between black rockers and commercial success. Acts like Sly Stone and Prince mixed disco, funk and soul with rock, but they were exceptions amid growing divisions between genres. Musicians from Living Colour, Fishbone, the Roots and other bands spend much time here blaming the Man at major labels -- though some complaints are legitimate enough -- and not enough pondering why black listeners don't support black rockers as they do indie rappers likewise ignored by the moneymen. Tech package is basic.

Camera (color, DVcam), Mel House. Reviewed at San Francisco Black Film Festival, June 10, 2006. Running time: 83 MIN.

10-Jul-06 9:00 AM

Community X Interview

noemail@electricpurgatory.com — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 18:00:00 GMT

Director Raymond Gayle was interviewd by Community X online in April of 2006. Click this this link to read the Community X Interview.

17-Apr-06 1:00 PM

Metroactive Article

noemail@electricpurgatory.com — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 23:00:00 GMT

Mūz Eclectic Purgatory By Bill Forman While it wasnt quite so jarring as the single evening I spent witnessing performances by Madonna, the Beastie Boys and Cabaret Voltaire, Saturdays juxtaposition of the Santa Cruz County Symphony at the Civic followed by Fishbone at the Catalyst made for one of those nights that remind you how much we take for granted the quality and diversity of music in this town. Now, I could, of course, spend the next few paragraphs holding forth on the similarities between Romanian cellist Mihai Maricas vibrato-suffused soloing during the Symphonys performance of Tchaikovskys Variations on a Rococo Theme and Angelo Moores quavering theremin solo during Fishbones set-closing Party at Ground Zero. I could then go on to cite a Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information study in which both cello and theremin players were invited to perform Le Cygne in 10 different tempi in order to create a computational model that will explicitly predict the nature...

23-Mar-06 6:00 PM

Fox 26 Interview

noemail@electricpurgatory.com — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 19:00:00 GMT

Director Raymond Gayle was featured on the Fox 26 Morning Show in Houston, TX.

17-Feb-06 1:00 PM

Must-See Music Documentaries

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 14:00:00 GMT

The first NZ documentary festival runs 15-28 Sept at the Academy Cinema in Auckland, and 29 Sept – 5 Oct at the Paramount Cinema in Wellington. This festival is the first in Australasia to focus exclusively on documentaries, and brings you over 230 of them to choose from! For music lovers, there are some must-see films, including: Sing Until the Slaughter You, about SerbiansJovan and Valdan who formed a reggae band called Del Arno. When the former federation of Yugoslavia began to collapse, the band began to rise. Ever since and despite the wars and dictatorship, they carry on singing about their battle for a better life. From Serbia to Slovenia their concerts are the living memory of their country’s fall. Years of war and misery anchored in their souls rise to the surface as a musical breath of wind whose lyrics in Serbian carry the seed of a new vision of the Balkans. Electric Purgatory is a documentary that examines the struggles of black American...

2-Sep-05 9:00 AM

Scene and Heard: Laura, Nef and Ana Play Out

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 14:00:00 GMT

Its fitting that in her review this month of Laura Thomass new CD Slow, Carrie Crespo draws a comparison to Nancy Sinatra. It was the latters 1966 hit These Boots Are Made For Walking that sticks in my memory, and it was the boots that Laura was wearing at her recent Knitting Factory gig that were similarly memorable. Laura herself made reference to them and was clearly pleased with the new knee high, titanium-healed purchase, for which she had shelled out nearly a months salary. The Knit evening - which Laura had put together including her friends LadyBug, Mahogany and Spacecake - had Laura performing with a band that shes only recently put together. And while she can hold her own as a live soloist, the backing brings out not only her powerful voice, but also a more brazen stage presence, of which those boots are a perfect prop. On record, the new CD continues to showcase Lauras Jazz-influenced style that was debuted on 2002s On My Sleeve on songs with honest, sometimes defiant,...

1-Aug-05 9:00 AM

The Black Album

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:00:00 GMT

A new film examines the darker side of rock By Scott Faingold Published: June 30, 2005 Rock n roll is a means of pulling the white man down to the level of the Negro. -- Asa Carter, secretary of the North Alabama White Citizens Council, 1956 Living Colours Vernon Reid Subject(s): Electric Purgatory Ironically, 50 years down the line, rock n roll has done such a good job of pulling the white man down that black folks -- who created the genre -- hardly rock at all anymore. Indeed, it often seems like any black musician daring to play rock is likely to be regarded as an interloper by the predominantly white rock audience, as well as a turncoat within the African-American community, where only hip-hop, jazz and R&B are considered acceptable. This brutal irony is the subject of the new documentary Electric Purgatory: The Fate of the Black Rocker by Houston filmmaker Raymond Gayle. When Fishbone was coming up in the 80s, they were playing the same clubs -- and sleeping on the...

30-Jun-05 9:00 AM

Crossover

Sat, 19 Feb 2005 14:00:00 GMT

By Charlie Braxton A few days ago several friends including Cheo sent me a series of posts concerning the controversy over a conference on Asians’ roll in hip hop. The conference was called Changing the Face of the Game: Asian Americans in Hip-Hop. It seems that the controversy centered on questions raised by Kenyon Farrow concerning Asian American hip hop journalist Oliver Wang’s comment which he felt de-emphasized the central role that Black people play in hip hop culture. Reading the many critiques and counter-critiques going back and forth reminded me of one of my favorite poems. “They done taken my blues and gone,” was written by the legendary Harlem Renaissance bard Langston Hughes. The line is the title to a powerfully emotional poem lamenting what Norman Kelly, author of the book, Black Heat, aptly describes as the colonization of Black music. Hughes wrote this poem during the Jazz Age, a period when mainstream white America began a love affair...

19-Feb-05 8:00 AM