Joe Sacksteder
Listen to: Scratch Where It Itches
When that head rolled off and kept counting in Aguirre: the Wrath of God, I was hooked. Soon I had amassed the largest Werner Herzog movie collection in southeast Michigan. Because he's fluent only in the profound and the ridiculous, I find his films actually enhanced by turning on the director's commentary. In Scratch we are hearing a jumbled version of commentary from just one film, Rescue Dawn. Herzog is as problematic a topic as patriotic war films, and these sound poems let me simultaneously pay homage to an artist I love and critique an aesthetic that is rooted in contradictions. I have a whole (unreleased) album of these things; for another fun one, see the Nov. 13th 2011 post of Queen Vic Knives. The music in "Scratch" is by Chris Westhoff and Mark Dickson; check out Mark's website at music.nestsounds.com.