Austin's My Education Soundtrack Murnau's Sunrise

You guys have done a live film score at the Alamo before, right?

Yeah, for an anime film called Angel's Egg. I actually found the original flyer for that in my car yesterday. I don’t know what the fuck it was still doing in my car. But we did it… I wanna say around two and a half years ago. Maybe even three years.

Did you know anything about Sunrise before the Alamo asked you to do the score?

James: Scott and I had both seen it before. Scott was actually the one that brought it up when we were originally talking about doing it. We were tossing around a bunch of silly names – I really wanted to do that motorcycle movie On Any Sunday, which is a 1970’s motocross movie.

Scott: And we also talked about doing Naked Prey.

James: Which is about a guy running across Africa with natives chasing him. It’s actually a really great movie. The original screenplay was set somewhere in mining territory, and there were Cherokees chasing miners. But for some reason the studio wouldn’t go for that, and they ended up doing it in Africa.

Scott: And we talked about maybe doing Nostalghia, which is an Andrei Tarkovsky movie. But we finally settled on Sunrise. ST-37 did two movies by Fritz Lang, the German silent film director. And Murnau is another great German silent film director—he did Nosferatu, which Brown Hornet did in the Alamo series. He’s one of the great German directors, and this is widely regarded to be one of his best films.

James: Even one of the best silent films. When you think about doing a [live score] for the Alamo, it’s so much easier to do a silent film than one with dialogue. But so many people have done them now that the really good silent films that are available to show have already been done. I was actually surprised that nobody had done this one. They originally approached us about doing it closer to Valentine’s Day. And we thought maybe we could do it on Valentine’s Day since it’s a love story.

Scott: It’s a classic love story.

Apparently it won an Academy Award at the very first Academy Awards ceremony.

James: That’s right.

Scott: It’s got a lot of really great imagery – you just can’t go wrong with Murnau. But all the good classic silent films have been taken, and in fact Metropolis has been done twice now. They had a DJ do it last year.

But choosing a movie was a really enjoyable process. Watching all those movies to winnow down what we were going to do. I went to Vulcan and I Heart Video and rented all these videos that James and I were talking about and we watched them all.

James: Although then, after it was all settled, I found the one that I really wanted to do which was a 1925 Italian movie called Maciste in Hell, which is awesome, but I’d completely forgotten about.

Brian: Next time, James.

James: I was really trying to find something that wasn’t silent. The few examples that really work are Fantastic Planet (which is great- it doesn’t require the sound at all), but somebody had already done that, and Carnival of Souls would have worked as well. I was really pushing for that film with William Shatner in it that’s done in Esperanto, [Incubus].

Scott: Is that the one where he’s being tormented in hell? I think that would be awesome.

James: And it’s in Esperanto. So people would go watch a movie in Esperanto, but wouldn’t actually hear it. It would be a real meta event.

Having done this [live score series] before, what made you want to do it again?

Scott: It’s always a fun show. A lot of people come out. My Education did very well with Angel's Egg. And ST-37 sold out the show for Metropolis—we had people scalping tickets outside the doors, and that’s unheard of for us. We’re an obscure band. I mean, we’ve been around for a long time, but we occupy a very specialized niche. And to have people scalping tickets outside one of our shows was a novel experience for us.

You try to make your gigs more like events. So they don’t just seem like run-of-the-mill, boring, average gigs. And also, it’s a very satisfying artistic challenge to work with something visual.

Is it easier to write music when you have something visual to start with? Or is it easier to start with absolutely no rules and sort of build form there?

James: We didn’t really start fresh with this one. We did come up with a couple of original pieces inspired by the movie, but mostly we adapted songs from the My Education catalog. We changed them to fit different scenes. And we included some stuff from the chamber trio that Kirk and the violin player and I used to be in, Cinders.

Scott: With My Education, it’s a little bit easier to adapt the pieces, because we’re an instrumental band. With ST-37, that wasn’t the case, because our songs generally have vocals, so it was a bit harder for ST to adapt existing songs. But with My Education, the process was a little bit easier. We sat and watched the movie a number of times and sort of brainstormed which pieces would work well—and My Education’s music is fairly cinematic in a lot of ways, I think.

James: Had it been a case where we were required to through-compose a piece for the whole thing, we never would have been able to do it.

Brian: Well, not on time anyway. (laughs) It would have taken us a lot longer to do something like that.

James: And it wouldn’t have been satisfying. Not for me, at least.

Brian: It would have been tedious.

James: And for me, it doesn’t fit the spirit of what this is about. People have come up with scores for Sunrise before—there are at least two of them in existence. But if you listen to silent film scores, they always just sound like a string quartet or an orchestra that’s just sort of randomly scrawling along. And that’s partly because of the way silent films were made. They weren’t made to have music over them, whereas a current film is usually cut to music. They pick some production music, they cut the film to it, then they tell the composer, “I need music that sounds like this music that we cut it to”. So it’s weird to try and through-compose music for a movie that wasn’t made to have music over it.

Brian: And also, there are the facial expressions.

Scott: One night when we were watching the movie, I made some comment like, “Look at their facial expressions. Notice how exaggerated they are?” And the whole band just looked at me like, “Uh, yeah- we knew that already”.

Brian: So we were thinking about stopping the movie halfway though [during Sunday’s screening] and having Scott explain that. Like, “Stop the film!"

Actually, in Roger Ebert’s essay about the film, he points that out. That the whole idea back then was to convey emotion, and not necessarily to be realistic. So I think that’s worth pointing out!

Scott: Well, it’s almost stylized. It’s almost like Kabuki theatre or something, where they had to exaggerate so that the people at the back of the hall could understand what was going on on stage. It’s not very realistic, it’s a very different thing.

Brian: And that adds to the surreal aspect of us playing music to the film. It’s really going to be an experience. The score is going to be it’s own piece – not just us playing along with the movie.

James: And I think people are going to be blown out of their seats during the thunderstorm scene.

Scott: Yeah. The first few rows should probably bring some earplugs.

James: Which you wouldn’t ordinarily think of doing for a silent film.

What’s the actual experience of playing in front of the film like? Do you get monitors, or…

Scott: No. You actually end up playing with your back to the audience a lot, because you’ve gotta watch what’s going on.

Brian: You also have to consider that you’re not the focus of the show like you are during a normal rock show. It’s not like playing at Emo’s or something -- in the theatre, people are watching the movie. To be honest, it’s a little more stressful because you have to think about keeping what you’re playing in time with the film. Whereas at a live show, you’re just rockin’.

Is it timed out exactly, or are you improvising to get things to fit?

James: No. But for whatever reason, it just works. Every time we play it through, everything is just sort of lined up.

Brian: It’s generally timed up, but it isn’t to the nanosecond or anything. But each scene has its piece.

James: And there’s some freedom to extend or shorten the pieces.

Does someone have to be in charge of keeping things moving?

Scott: James is the conductor.

Do you have to wear that fancy conductor jacket?

James: I don’t think we’ve talked about any stage work just yet.

Scott: Well, it’s pretty dark in there. And the musicians really are sort of secondary, so that takes off the pressure of having to be social with the audience. And it’s a little bit crowded down there. It’ll be hard to cram all seven of us in.

Brian: So there won’t be any duck-walking or anything.

So will there be some new material form the new record in the score?

Brian: Yeah, there will be. I think a couple songs.

James: They’re not exactly the pieces. They’ve been adapted for the film.

Brian: And half of it is original music written for the movie. And after we release the [new] record, we’re thinking about maybe developing it more.

Scott: “First Light” on the new ST-37 album actually grew out of a piece that ST did for Destiny at the Alamo.

James: And actually, one of the pieces we’re using is based on an ST-37 song.

Scott: Oh, that’s right! We wrote different themes to go with different characters and events in the movie, and one of the riffs is lifted form a very old ST-37 song. You know, you’ve got to look through your musical repertoire and pick things that you think will be good representations of different themes and events.

Brian: And a lot of the time when you’re writing music, you’ll come up with a riff, and then three years later you’ll take that piece and add something to it. So some stuff was just floating around in our heads.

Scott: I can easily see us taking some of these scenes that we did into the studio, and making them into something entirely different.

It would seem like a shame to write so much music and then not do anything else with it. I mean, that’s a lot of time to fill.

An hour and a half is a long time to be playing. Unless you’re Bob Dylan or something. And most people don’t normally watch a band for that long either.

When is the forthcoming record…forthcoming?

Brian: We’re scheduled to finish the recording at the end of April. But due to having a new member, it might be postponed a month or so. We’re still working that out. But hopefully by the end of April or the first week of May we’ll have it recorded and mixed. Then we’ll have to get it mastered. But I’d hope to have it out by the end of the year.

Scott: We’re hoping to get the single that we did with Dalek out soon. We actually went to New York and recorded our interpretation of an Arvo Part piece. The A Side will have our rather short interpretation of it, and the B Side is going to have a crazy, extended techno remix version that Dalek did. It even has a Dalek rap on top of it, which is a big departure for us. Vocals on a My Education song is a big departure to begin with—and to have Dalek rapping over top of it is a very interesting contrast to our usual recorded output. And I can’t wait to get the on vinyl, because it’s really well suited for a twelve-inch, I think.

Brian: Realistically, it takes a long time to release a record. But we’ll have the Dalek single out by the end of the year, and then our new record out by the spring.

James: I think Brian’s being pessimistic. I’m gonna crack the whip on this. We’re trying to get this stuff done as fast as possible.

Brian: We’ve got a lot of material worked up, so we just need to start getting it out.