Silver Play

A video mixtape made up of Sogo's most enduring aesthetic and experiential preoccupations, full of flickering light, electronic vibrations and a total submission to noise, ecstatic and pure. Made as a personal gift before the artist's untimely death.

"He stole her girlfriend, and never said thank you for that. super self centered I will pay for that. I did it all. No I won't pay for that. To you NEVER. You did nothing. It's all your fault. I told all my friends how shitty you are. And no, I won't pay for that. You really didn't do nothing. I didn't like your films. Same things over and over again. Label starts walking by itself. You always talk about drug. Stupid shouck value vs. scummy elite attitute. Expressing bullshit psych. You ended up saying the words that you know; society, culture, people and art, ya, fuck sake. Then, closer always gets used, and you act like an asshole, whole equally wasted, isn't that big anyway..." (Stom Sogo, 2002 NYUFF program notes)

Short film by Stom Sogo dealing with ambient topologies and malleable forms.

"Try was originally shot on Super-8mm film and then re-shot on video. The idea was to have the image of young kids kissing forever. Ecstasy here is so wasted." (Stom Sogo)

Re-edit of earlier Super8 home movies with a melancholic soundtrack. One of Stom's last completed works prior to his death.

"A vaporous, stop-motion continuum of barely legible images dynamized by a pulsating electronic soundtrack. Although he draws on a bunch of avant-garde classics from Ernie Gehr’s Reverberation to Brakhage’s hand-painted films, Sogo’s voice is assured and all his own." (Amy Taubin)

Video by Stom Sogo.

"Lika is a glimpse into the mesmerizing world of Stom Sogo: a lush kaleidoscope of manipulated video fragments set to an entrancing electronic score. Lika subverts common signifying processes as it weaves rhythmic variations of radiant textures into a captivating immersive experience, equally mysterious and seductive in its masterful play with degrees of abstraction." (Tomonari Nishikawa)

'This is about the dreamlike images I saw while having epilepsy seizures, as they quite often happened in the past years.' (Stom Sogo)

"Her again??? But, well, it's out of my body like no heroin for a year. And their inner lights fade into TV monitor with no signal at all. And my ep spins endless." (Stom Sogo, 2002 NYUFF program notes)

"The film begins within Thoreauan-Brakhage territory, with black-and-white shots of leaves in a forest. Slowly, to the sounds of electronic noise, the images transform into blotchy green, yellow and purple compositions that become increasingly abstract through an array of techniques like hand-processing, painting on the film, and multiple re-photography of projected images. Sogo’s candy-colored outer space of handmade coronae takes the viewer on what feels like a bizarre, overpowering journey through the filmmaker’s own singular, labyrinthine mind." (Ed Halter)

COLOUR, DVD

"Bracing, cryptic, and unsettling, this piece shows an advance in both decisiveness and risk. The soundscape is terrifyingly beautiful. The images take us on strange country roads, into the thick of drug deals, and suspicious fires ravished and abandoned love and unidentifiable turbulence. Whiplash edits prevail over vérité moments that eventually become unmoored by dreamlike intrusions. Some cuts have the power of pulmonary arrest and others are non-abrasive but startling in their disjunctions of time and place." (Mark McElhatten)

Video by Stom Sogo.

In Guided By Voices, Sogo constructs a film version of Dennis Cooper's novel Guide. The highly abstracted, colored digital video (shot on video and Super-8) evokes a psychedelic experience. As Sogo recalls: "It was 5:45 AM; [I was] crashing at a friend's house, deep in Brooklyn, where I was dealing with a final point in the movie. Then, I crashed with a seizure, all my memories flashed before me. I fell off the stairs, and the film finished itself."

"I think I should think more hard when I'm making films to record images, instead of just going out and shoot, but I like people smiling without thinking why they are smiling. I think these faces are so funny." (SS)