How to Record (a) Lightning Bolt? Filmic Representations and Esthetic Issues of the « Guerilla Gig »

Abstract

Little known from the mainstream audience, the American rock band Lightning Bolt has built part of its reputation on the intensity of its concerts, the musicians systematically playing on the floor, in an extremely close to the audience. This proximity, linked to a music characterized by its repetitive and « noisy » aspect, generates on the viewers/listeners a trance-like feeling, that many professional or amateur filmmakers have attempted to seize, in different contexts. This article will focus on several of these films, in order to evaluate how the strategies of audiovisual recording displace the traditional mise en scène of the relationships between musicians and audience, and therefore, invite us to question musical performativity as a dynamic that would solely need to be « recorded », in instance to express or understand it. In these films, indeed, the choices regarding technical tools, framing, editing, or the relationships between musicians and audience, thus become elements allowing the filmmakers to consider the concert as an event which is not only a cultural representation, but also acquires a ritual dimension which underlines its anthropological dimension.