Back to headlines
Larger Text 
Smaller Text
Devil ensemble helps give musical voice to silent films
|
|
|
|
Details Devil Music Ensemble With: "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.' When: 8 p.m. today. Admission: $10. Where: Regent Square Theater. Details: (412) 681-5449. Tools
|
By Michael Machosky
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, April 1, 2004
The
Devil Music Ensemble, a trio of ultra-talented Boston multi-instrumentalists,
needed some direction. It wasn't a crisis, but a vexing problem nonetheless --
the members had performed as an improvisational rock trio, an Eastern European
Gypsy band, a country-and-western group and a classical ensemble focusing on
modern composers.
How could they pick just one?
Then they found their calling. On tour as a
rock band, they played one show at a club in Providence, R.I, performing
semi-improvised music while Jean Cocteau's "Blood of a Poet" was
projected on a a moviescreen.
"It was just a great experience,"
says the Devil Music Ensemble's Jonah Rapino. "But we didn't take it
seriously."
But
they got asked to do this again and again. Sensing that they were on to
something, the Devil Music Ensemble now devotes itself full-time to creating
and performing new scores for classic silent films. Well, except for the band's
weekly gig in Boston as a country band.
They're performing in Pittsburgh tonight at
the Regent Square Theater, scoring one of the true masterpieces of silent
horror, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari."
Devil Music's slippery, sinister rock and
jazz rhythms propel the film's fractured, bizarre storyline -- which connects a
carnival sideshow act, a clairvoyant sleepwalker and a slew of unexplained
murders in a web of conspiracy. Jaunty Old World folk tunes collide with
cascades of tense, atonal electric guitar, keeping the mood tense and paranoid,
fearing what's around the next corner. Oddly assembled soundscapes that
reference sources as varied as Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon"
and Glenn Branca's avant-garde orchestras for massed guitars, mirror the
movie's famously deranged architecture.
Violin, electric guitar and drums provide the
core of the group's sound. "We're just a trio, but we keep adding
instrumentation," Rapino says. "I play vibraphone, which is kind of
like a xylophone. The guitar player added lap steel guitar. He actually plays
that through an old analogue synthesizer -- you get some really amazing sounds
through that.
"We're providing a kind of rhythm for
the scene, and then sometimes a sound effect," Rapino says. "There's
a scene where the lap steel is used very effectively, when a woman [onscreen]
is being kidnapped. The guitarist playing lap steel gets these kind of howling
sounds out of it, leading up to the point where the guy grabs the girl -- then
howling gets really high very quickly. It's amazing how it really sounds like
someone screaming."
The Devil Music Ensemble isn't the only group
doing this. Strangely enough, silent films with live music seems like a perfect
fit for this multimedia age. At least five such groups have performed in
Pittsburgh in the past two years.
Rapino doesn't see them as competition -- he
sees this as a genuine movement with enough potential audiences for everybody.
"There might even be more interest in
making new silent films," Rapino says. "There's this movie that came
out called 'The Triplets of Belleville,' where there's virtually no dialogue.
Something like that could lend itself very well to live music."
Michael Machosky can be reached at mmachosky@tribweb.com or (412) 320-7901.
|
|
|
|
|
|