2 out of 5

Label: African Tape

Produced by: Alexis Gideon

I lack familiarity with Alexis Gideon, as well as the source material – Chinese novel Journey to the West – which was adapted for this hour long mixed media ‘animated video opera.’  Split into four parts that would likely correspond to the four parts outlined in the wiki synopsis – and presumably how the LP is split up into four sides – Sun Wu-Kong could further be broken down by how Alexis was divvied up his ‘songs’, which then may or may not align with individual chapters from the book. That linked summary is, itself, a bit wandering, perhaps flavored by the 16th century era in which it was written and then additionally being woven through with myth and folklore, and Gideon may have used his own or different romanizations of the names from that text and whatnot, so it’s difficult for me at this point to actually link his interpretation to the book, but this is all a roundabout way to say that my inability to follow along essentially factors into my rating.

Though: should I have to be a fan of Journey to the West to enjoy this?  I guess I can’t speak to Gideon’s intention – perhaps the audience for this is meant to be targeted in some fashion – but without that context, I want to assume that I could approach this cold.  Musically, Gideon’s off-key, slightly off-beat nasal rapping over electro-lite laptop beats is odd, but not necessarily off-putting, as he achieves a sort of zen, pitter-patter flow that works well with the overall looseness of the construction, and alternating portions where he chants phrases over fairly shallow washes of keys also kind of work in the soundtrack sense with the childlike visuals of the accompanying DVD as something to zone out to. But do these styles go together sonically? No. Are they edited together to flow from scene to scene, or track to track?  No. Both styles have sudden beginnings and endings, and repeat, excepting the lyrics, again and again, or at least to the extent that I didn’t hear anything that made one track stand out from its similar others.  And then, obviously, is zoning out a desirable response? Back to the visuals, Sun Wu-Kong is a mixture of flat, hand-drawn characters (with a sort of squiggle-vision effect) and some puppetry, which is interesting enough as the first part of the story is entered in to, but as the animation mostly involves character cutouts just sliding across similarly colored backgrounds of similar, rustic colored-pencil colors, there again isn’t much to actually hold our attention, especially with the hard shifts in story (from, I’d suppose, part to part) when new characters are introduced.

So without awareness of Gideon’s other work, this alone wouldn’t do much to direct me toward that material, and without appreciation for Journey to the West, the story made very little impression – lyrically, just trying to follow along, which unfortunately includes some truly cringe moments of exposition dumping forced into raps; and not enough to even align it with a text summary of the tale – beyond there being a monkey named Sun Wu-Kong.

There are some other adaptations of the story that I might give a go, which could then merit a curious return to see if it enhances Video Musics II’s impact, but my going-into-it-cold reaction to the experience is not a favorable one.