Glasgow Film Festival
The List, January 2013
The Arches, Glasgow, February 16th,
3-11pm
Science-fiction and electronic music have long
co-existed in parallel universes, the assorted experimental visionaries behind
them predicting the future. Detroit techno pioneer and long-term sci-fi
obsessive Jeff Mills in particular has made such a symbiosis a
dimension-expanding virtue. These two worlds finally collide beneath Caledonian
skies when Mills beams down his live soundtrack to Viennese-born expressionist
auteur Fritz Lang’s 1929 film, ‘Woman in the Moon’, as part of an all-day space
invasion known as Sonic Cineplex.
This meeting of minds between Mills and Lang originally
came via the Cinematechque of France, who first recognised what such a space-age
collaboration could contribute to a Lang retrospective.
“I was aware of Lang’s other films,” Mills explains,
“but ‘Woman in the Moon’ had really escaped. It was Lang’s only bona-fide
science-fiction film, and was produced in two distinct parts. It’s a melodrama,
with the first part introducing the characters on Earth preparing to go to the
Moon, then they’re on the Moon itself. That allowed me to compose in two parts,
and it’s two very different soundtracks, really. The first part is more
suspense-driven and dramatic, then composing for the moon sequences, I had to
bear in mind that when the film came out that this was the first time a lot of
people had seen that sort of representation of the Moon. That gave things more
depth and mystery, and allowed me to play with hiss and white noise, counter
sounds, really.”
All of which ties in with Mills’ first realisation
that space was the place.
“Growing up in America during the sixties, with the
activities of NASA, and all the discussions dominating the news, it was
inescapable,” he remembers. “During the launch of every Apollo mission, we’d be
pulled out of class to watch it on TV in the school auditorium, so the idea of
space science and imagining things beyond the earth was always there. It was
the same with music. Both of these things were about leaving the walls of the
century.”
Sonic Cineplex’s series of explorations in sound and
vision forms part of Glasgow Film Festival, and looks set to take over The
Arches inside a T.A.R.D.I.S.-like galaxy of rooms not quite of this earth. As
well as Mills, among others, a bumper-sized programme will feature
post-dub-step industrialists, Raime, who will apply images to their recently
released ‘Quarter Turns Over A Living Line’ album. Optimo leading light JD Twitch,
meanwhile will provide a live cinemix to Baraka’s adventure in dialogue-free,
actor-absent plotlessness. Adam Stafford will improvise a new score to Robert Wiene’s
1920 silent horror, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, while Dieter Moebius of German
kosmische icons, Kluster, presents his soundtrack to Lang’s better-known future
fantasy, ‘Metropolis’.
Mills is particularly delighted to hear about the
latter. Not only is he and Moebius long-term fellow-travellers, but Mills
scored his own take on ‘Metropolis’ prior to ‘The Woman in the Moon’.
Beyond ‘Woman in the Moon’, Mills plans to tackle
‘Things To Come’ the 1936 celluloid version of H.G. Wells’ future-history novel
published three years earlier, ‘The Shape of Things To Come’. For the present,
Lang is opening up an increasingly brave new world for Mills.
“The more I look at his films,” he says, “the more I
can relate to them as a musician. The way he tells stories, he’s like Stanley
Kubrick, in that they both left an enormous amount of space in the way they shot
their films to emphasise different types of spliced scenes, but which were
always symmetrical, only displaying the most important part of each scene.
‘Woman in the Moon’ is perfect for that. It’s all about possibilities, but by
the time they take off, the soundtrack kind of disappears.” The List, January 2013
ends
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