Three subsequent nights in April 2009 Mogwai performed for an audience at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, and Vincent Moon and Nathanael Le Scouarnac filmed it all. Abbreviated into shaky chiaroscuro shots of New York, the film slides and contorts across the screen, physically interpreting the punchbowl-waterfall of post-rock avant-noise that traps the unstructured din of the city in its bubble.
"Burning," the Glasgow natives’ first concert film, opens with “The Precipice,” an ominously ascending piece that lingers and climaxes for nearly five minutes before it digresses and the title of the film appears in text against a grainy close-up of rain splashing on the pavement. Silhouettes of wet-weather commuters and the white noise of rainfall provide the first between-song intermission as the camera appears lost in the shuffle but zooms in on Stuart Braithwaite tentatively hailing a taxi and then giving up to catch the subway instead, we assume to reach the music venue seen in a later shot with “Mogwai” scrolled along the marquee sign. Other than the odd flicker of downtown signage, the first 46 minutes of the 48-minute long film is devoid of words. The only singing is unintelligible and robotic, filtered through a vocoder during “Hunted by a Freak,” which shares notable instrumental similarities with much of Hinterland's Under the Waterline album.
The guitar finesse of Stuart Braithwaite and John Cummings combined with Dominic Aitchison’s bass, Barry Burns’ keyboards, and drummer Marty Bulloch’s cymbal heavy rhythms, produce an arresting dualism of menace and euphoria.
"Burning" is clearly about Mogwai’s brand of restrained, emotive, textural music, not necessarily the individual musicians. But a balance between the two is struck in the aesthetic choice to design a film largely focused on the experience of Mogwai’s live performance rather than psychedelic ruminations on abstract ideas through visual stimulation (think Pink Floyd and lasers). The film is careful not to over-glorify the talent of the band members, but to dissolve them into a single product of musical experience – artist, work, audience, and how that work (music) impacts listener cognition. The concept summons Maria Abramovic’s performance piece, "The Artist is Present," where a spectator sat motionless and silent before her for as long as he or she was capable of keeping eye contact. The intention, as with Mogwai, was two opposite things at once -- for the spectator to use the artist as a blank slate, so to look inward, and to experiment with the fundamental need for human connection. A common response to Abramovic’s art piece (as with Mogwai, again) was startling emotional overload.
It can get deep, like when one of two audio tracks pipes in toward the end, revealing one audience member’s experience: “… It makes me see stuff from my childhood and my dead father … it’s like acid but there’s no comedown, it’s so beautiful!” But the film is also sure to patch holes of the potentially infinite philosophical musings it inspires with grounded worldly comforts like flashes of knowing smiles, spirited applause from the audience, and intermittent cuts to young people socializing outside the venue.
After performing their last song, “Batcat,” a recording of a woman’s voice is sublimated onto the clamor of the audience, meditating on Mogwai’s music: “…because this music can put a human being in a trance-like state … the music is bigger than words and wider than pictures. If the stars had a sound, they would sound like this.” -- a restrained and aptly placed slice of dialogue wedged in to end the performance and the film on a comforting and uplifting note.