Director Nathan Christ, musician Bill Baird, AMP co-founder James Moody, Mayor's Chief Of Staff Ritch Bailey, AMO's Brad Stein, and HAAM's Carolyn Schwarz discuss music, politics, and other issues facing Austin's creative class at #aff2010. Photo by Yusef Svacina

It didn’t really register that I’d moved away from Austin until coming back to the Austin Film Festival for the Echotone screenings. I didn’t brood and plan about moving away for much time at all. Austin doesn’t really let you do that. Just when you think you can’t possibly stay another day – when the heat melts you to the sidewalk, when the lack of work becomes too stifling, when your curiosity/travel bug begins to tell you that other pastures might be greener – just when you start to think that way, some incredible 24-hour coffeehouse opens just down the street, or you see an inspiring show from Sleep Good or Machine or Shapes Have Fangs, or the guys at Transmission curate another brilliant Fun Fun Fun Fest. You start to think, maybe I can stay here another 5 years!

It’s hard to know if it’s a velvet rut or not. All I know is that I left. We finished making Echotone in February and have been moving ever since. I was lifted West by the swell of the Robin Lombaria’s Marfa Film Festival, truly one of the strongest weeks of my life – nothing short of a rainbow gathering, a collision of creative people, family, and beloved friends from all over the country. From there, a short respite in Chicago before working as a cook all summer in a Buddhist community deep in the French countryside. It was a different kind of a work, a time to recharge and regroup before the next push – the Echotone film festival circuit and the upcoming plan to develop Echotone into a miniseries.

After France, I decided wintry Chicago was the place for me. We want to explore the concepts and themes we discovered in the Austin story in other American cities (specifically Chi Town, L.A., and NYC). I’ve been up here on an anthropological dig, exploring the massive, sprawling megalopolis, trying to figure out where the passionate individuals lie, whether in music, film, or theater. Chicago’s been my docking point for the growing nationwide Echotone expeditions: Los Angeles Downtown Independent Film Festival, Dallas Video Fest, Hot Springs Film Festival, the upcoming Starz Denver Film Festival, and our madcap Rumble Tour, where we drove all across the West Coast with the film and the musicians from the film in tow.

Coming home to Austin took me by surprise. Both of our screenings were completely sold out, with people in the aisles and on folding chairs. The hometown support was deeply moving. Then there was the annual ATX Converge event, where musicians from the film (Machine, Dana Falconberry, The White White Lights, and Sunset) sent vibrations from within the beloved Mohawk (one of the epicenters of our film).

We racked up a lot of critical praise and had plenty of Austinites come up to us and gush about how we nailed the story, how it inspired them to continue in their artistic pursuits. I even had a young woman come up to me and say that she was about to drop out of her Music Business degree before she saw the film, that it had lit a fire underneath her to keep going and not give up. It was a big step for me when the musicians in the film gave it a thumbs up. Now, it seems, Austin is behind it.

So, yes, Momentum. It’s on the tips of our tongues. I dream about the word. I ponder what it means. I wake up each morning recognizing its importance. It’s up to us to keep going, to turn the vision into a miniseries and scale the mountain before us: the nationwide Echotone story.
- Nathan Christ, Director

All photos by Yusef Svacina, courtesy of Swatch Photography.

Recent Press from Austin Film Festival

-Interview with Director Nathan Christ and Producer Dániel Perlaky on KUT 90.5′s Texas Music Matters
-Feature Article by the Austinist
-AV CLUB’s AFF Recap – Echotone earns ‘best hometown representation.’
-Review by Jette Kernion at Cinematical.com

The Line extends around the block for a sold out screening at the Alamo Ritz. Slated for the same time that day was the AFF Award's Luncheon with David Simon, and a Texas Longhorns Home Game...Live Music is Austin's Pro Sport! Photo by Yusef Svacina.

Mayor Will Wynne's Chief of Staff Ritch Bailey, and Producer Nicholas Jayanty discuss momentum and community action after a sell out screening at the Alamo Ritz during @austinfilmfest. Photo by Yusef Svacina.

Director Nathan Christ post Ritz screening at #aff2010. Photo by Yusef Svacina.

The Voodoo Highway team basks in a pitch perfect screening of Echotone. Photo by Yusef Svacina.

Soaking in success Associate Producer Nate Ferrone is A-OK. Photo by Yusef Svacina.

Bill Baird and Victor Moyers catch a breath at the Driskill post screening #aff2010. Photo by Yusef Svacina.

I get by with a little help...Photo by Yusef Svacina.

Dana Falconberry hypnotizes at the ATX CONVERGE 2010. Photo by Yusef Svacina.

Jenny Gacy of the White White Lights delivers a sonic sermon... the Reverend Gacy has the stage. Photo by Yusef Svacina.

They’ve got me more excited than any event happening during the official SXSW stretch. They are ATX Emerge, tonight at the Mohawk, and Art Disaster, tomorrow night at Beauty Bar.

Without hyping the exciting bands, I’ll speak as a documentary filmmaker. These events and the people behind them (including Emerge’s sister Fall event ATX Converge) were the petrie dishes for Echotone.

It was at ATX Converge that we first filmed Black Joe Lewis (the same month he and the Honeybears signed to Lost Highway/Universal Records). The Mohawk was quick to become the epicenter for the world of the story. Not only do our 3 central bands (Sunset, Black Joe, and Belaire) all play within the Mohawk’s walls on-camera, the Mohawk also directly plays into one of the downtown development stories in Echotone. The flats across the street have caused some interesting hurdles to spring up for the folks at the Mohawk.

SXSWers! Look up! Look at how much the city has changed since you were last eating our tacos! Also, don’t for a moment think that the weather is this pleasant year-round. The heat maelstrong is fast approaching. You’re in the sweet spot.

Lastly, the grassroots companies who organized the orginal Emerge 2 years ago (Reversal Films, Indierect Records, Swatch Post, Voodoo Highway) were all utterly instrumental in giving Echotone its legs.

Some of the brightest, most talented, most passionated (and many times the most preening) members of ATX’s film/music/fashion/design culture will be at Emerge tonight. And the music will blow you away.

Art Disaster, put on by Daniel Perlaky, is likewise a nonstop art orgy. The event is aptly titled and Mr. Perlaky seems to delight in the chaos of it all. DJs, MCs, psychadelia, screenprinting, poster show, a photo booth, and free booze. The makings of a beautiful mess of people coming together and sharing in the local energy.

Cutting the scenes together from what we shot of these events over the last 2 years already makes me a bit nostalgic. Not the syrupy kind. The kind that makes me want to go out and continue participating in this very inspiring time.

-Nathan

Here are some clips from our long night at Gigantic, the surround sound studio. The magician you see is Tom Paul and he took our film to a new experiential level.

Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears

The Apeshits

Belaire

Her songwriting reminds me of Joni Mitchell and her voice recalls Joanna Newsom. Those references are limited, though, as Dana is her own unique force of nature. Just go to one of her shows and you’ll find an entire room full of people watching in rapt silence.

The fact that Dana can’t support herself off of her music should be a crime. That’ll change soon.

Expertly recorded by David Hixon and mixed by Dave Kelly, here are a few of Dana’s songs, two of which are in Echotone.

Click the play button below to stream “Possum Song,” and as an extra bonus download “Possum Song” and “Baby Blue Sky” live by clicking “Get 2 Echotone Valentine’s B sides Here.” Feel free to embed the widget on your blog, share it with fellow music lovers on your Facebook or Twitter, and be sure to stay tuned, because next week we are leaking a scene from the film featuring of one of these songs.

A few nights ago, we finished the sound design pre-mix for Echotone. From this point, we sail up to NYC and mix the sound to 5.1 (Dolby surround sound)! Feels like a brave new world.

Dave Kelly and the sound design team at Voodoo Highway are magicians. They work at the speed of thought. Every shriek of a guitar, every bit of dirty feedback, every dancing crane, is accounted for in the sound scape. I’ve learned loads about the sound world. Some of the effects that are in the sequence you don’t so much hear as feel.

Here are some snapshots of what it all looks like. Every little colored segment was a critical decision. Click on the images to make them larger.

Christopher Cox and Tosca String Quartet recording. photo: Dave Kelly

Christopher Cox’s piece “Fantasy in D Flat Major” has for four years been a muse for every script I’ve written. It’s helped me form idiosyncratic quirks for characters on the page and allowed me to visualize the world these characters inhabit.

Chris and I were introduced by Vic Moyers (of Reversal Films) while I was at the UT film school and Chris was a at Berklee School of Music in Boston. Vic and I were working on our thesis film Paper Balls when he suggested Chris could compose a score for it. For this 8-minute short, we were bootstrapping even more than we were for Echotone. Funds were very low, so Chris had to rely on distant phone calls and a small collection of cinematic references to work with. Still, he composed a beautiful and elegiac score that fit the film like a glove.

Tosca String Quartet at the Church House. photo: Dave Kelly

During the visit up to Boston, Chris and I became good friends, talking excitedly into the night about influences ranging from Mingus to Kandinsky. It was inspiring to witness someone so skilled within their own craft drawn on influences outside of the music world.

07 Fantasy in D-flat Major

So, when he sent me the demo recording of “Fantasy in D Flat Major” in 2005, I immediately started using it as a backdrop for nascent scenes in half-formed scripts. I played it on repeat and it provided moments in time for stories that I couldn’t yet fathom: A lovely young blonde woman walking through downtown Austin the springtime, oblivious to the fact that the State of Texas is executing an innocent man on death row at that very moment.  In another scene from a different story, a young thespian is haunted by the death of his brother, who, for his role as Billy the Kid, is the talk of the town before tragedy strikes. While walking downtown, he sees a spectral image of his brother floating high in the air, above the buildings.

These images and moments seemed to come out of nowhere and were directly fueled by Chris’ music.

Christopher Cox listening to the mix. photo: Dave Kelly

When I tried to explain to Chris what the music did for me over the years, and how he could expand on it for future scores, I said, “I think nostalgic is the key word.” He said, “Yeah, but all music like this is nostalgic and melancholy.” One of the many moments that showed me the power of collaboration, of bringing together and sustaining a group of artists and creative producers that can challenge each other and pick up where the others’ skill set tapers off. This is precisely what Reversal Films is doing in Austin, TX. While the organization is only two years in, Echotone is proof that grassroots filmmaking is possible and, hopefully, sustainable. Time will tell.

Fast forward to Echotone’s production and you’ll find Robert Garza (Director of Photography) and me up at dawn day after day, waiting for the city to wake up. Workers riding the service elevator before the rest of the city begins to stir, a jarring boom, and the sunrise cuts through the porta-potties. Then the cranes dance and the condo work begins for the day, one of many to come. I knew the depiction of Austin’s development, at once hopeful, beautiful, and threatening, had to feel like a symphony. It had to feel like the band getting together: buzz saw guitars, hammer snares, and industrial air conditioner bass drums. Finally I saw a scene in which “Fantasy” could be tangible.

Ink on a page. photo: Dave Kelly

A few days ago, after months of planning, it all came together. Chris gathered some of the best classical players in Austin. We all met at David Boyle’s Church House Studio , a renovated church deep in the East Side. Grant Johnson donated his time as the engineer with David Hixon (Echotone’s sound recordist) assisting. All through the day, it went down, in sections. The Tosca Strings came first, followed by contrabass, bassoon, oboe, clarinet, flute, French and English horns, and, to fulfill the glissando that rockets the camera up 50 stories, a lovely harp.

Grant Johnson behind the mixing board. photo: Dave Kelly

A few of us went to the Longbranch Inn afterwards for celebratory beers, knowing this was an important brick in the giant wall. We are nearing completion.

And, while it hasn’t been properly mixed yet, I can only describe “Phantasmagoria” (the piece’s new name) as sublime.

While providing this adrenaline, SXSW often comes under fire for its relative negligence of the troves of unsigned musicians who labor day after day in Austin’s many venues.

It’s important to mention SXSW now, as they are currently considering ECHOTONE as a premiere in March (likewise, we are considering if they are the best fit for ECHOTONE to make its first major stand). We don’t want it to feel like a local backyard BBQ where everyone from Austin is patting themselves on the back and pointing out the local record shop that flies past Black Joe Lewis’ window as he delivers fish for Quality Seafood.

Still, there’s the greater emotional vision of what a SXSW premiere could provide for the viewer. At the visceral climax, the credits roll, and the audience walks out into the precisely the world they’ve just experienced for 90 minutes.

One of the film’s heartbeats is its depiction of art and commerce and what that even means in the present day. If even Glenn Danzig can’t make a dime for his music, how does the unsigned, relatively unknown artist survive in this climate? What does that mean for a city that calls itself the “Live Music Capital of the World,” in which musicians collectively bring in a billion dollars a year into its economy apart from SXSW and Austin City Limits?

Before gushing embarrassingly a la a film like Before the Music Dies, we became more interested in the gray areas found between these questions. There is Bill Baird, whose band Sound Team was signed to Capitol Records and subsequently dropped when their album Movie Monster didn’t sell enough copies. There is Black Joe Lewis, who we managed to depict schlepping tilapia in his fish truck while simultaneously blowing up on the world stage with his soul-revivalist outfit The Honeybears. Then there is Cari Palazollo and her group Belaire, formed with Jason Chronis of Voxtrot. Along with their manager Daniel Perlaky (of Indierect Records and City on Fire photography/design), they struggle with the balance of artistic integrity and commercialization of their infectiously catchy music.

It is here that Echotone thrives. In this city, with its distinct personality crisis and among these musicians (and others like Dana Falconberry, The Black Angels, Ghostland Observatory, Machine, The Apeshits, Ume, and the Octopus Project), the noise and distortion makes everything that much more vibrant.

Ecotone: “from a combination of eco(logy) plus -tone, from the Greek tonos or tension – in other words, a place where ecologies are in tension.”

More soon.

“It’s turning into a city, but it still thinks it’s a sleepy town.”

We knew we liked the music happening around us. Belaire, White Denim, Black Joe Lewis. Something seemed to be happening, but when Robert Garza (Echotone’s Director of Photography) and I discussed the burgeoning vision of the project, we avoided the phrase “music scene” like cancer. There was something so presumptuous about it, as true as it might have been.

We were also extremely leery of music documentaries that relied on the cultural cache of movements and zeitgeists that happened decades before.

“You shoulda been there,” they’d tell us. “But if you had been there, so and so would’ve broken your fuckin’ nose.”

Even the documentaries I respected like American Hardcore or Kill Your Idols read to me more like vital historical relics than anything else. We get the sense that the opinions and viewpoints are cemented in time. Kill Your Idols, about the so-called No Wave movement that surfaced in NYC in the early 1980s, attempted to bridge the gap from the old vanguard (Lydia Lunch, DNA, Sonic Youth) to the new (The Liars, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Black Dice). It trips itself up, though, in its determination to define the musical culture of New York. There are tons of talking heads, which we knew we wanted to keep to a minimum in our film. Our maxim from the gate was that a film about music should be as kinetic as the music itself. It shouldn’t be chock-full of people telling you how you should feel.

The seminal influences for Echotone’s baby steps forward were the Maysles Brothers’ Gimme Shelter (About the 1969 Rolling Stones Altamount show that ended in four deaths. A true freak show. Feels like the end of an era. Its extended depictions of crowds flowing from all across the world to see the Stones is breathtaking.), D.A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop (filming Janis Joplin’s foot stomping while she wails is a stroke of genius), and Penelope Spheeris’ The Decline of Western Civilization.

Western Civilization was clearly directed by someone entrenched in the culture, riled and probably even scared by it. It was shot in a small cluster of L.A. clubs over the course of a few months in 1980. Spheeris depicts a world in a state of near-anarchy, as groups like X, Black Flag, and the Germs blur the lines between rage, politics, poverty, and music. The beauty of her particular form of documentary lies in that it confronts a particular moment in history, when the future seemed unwritten. Western Civilization is not looking back on an era with rosy-colored glasses. It is made by a fan wanting to dig deeper not only into the music itself, but the surrounding sociological factors, the press, and the upheaval of the American identity proper. It feels unsafe, volatile, alive.

I’m not sure what sort of cultural hype L.A. punk carried at the time the film was released, but I’ll bet it seemed like bullshit to anyone that was actually there. Which brings me to Austin, TX, circa now. Look no further than the recent New York Times travel article “36 Hours in Austin, TX”. It does well to allude that the city is in supreme flux, but its tips to tourists are unfortunately the same old phoned-in mainstays. It might as well read:

Mosey on out of the downtown Hilton, pardner, put on yer cowboy duds and head on down to the Broken Spoke for some good ol’ honky tonk.

Before it takes the absurd cowboy clichés too far, it makes sure to mention the city’s ubiquitous slogan “Keep Austin Weird.”

This is the home of Janis Joplin, reminded. And, you know, Willie Nelson, who we all know bridged the hippie/cowboy divide in the 60s, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. There’s Scratch Acid, Doug Sahm, Lightnin’ Hopkins and (most relevant to me) Townes Van Zandt and Daniel Johnston and the wailing 13th Floor Elevators. There’s a cultural history here, and it’s anything but dead.

Certainly the New York Times has a bottom line in the realm of tourist dollars, but their cultural snapshot of my town misses the mark by totally neglecting the Red River District, the epicenter for Austin’s current cultural renaissance.

It’s with this spirit that our cinematic journey began, with a balanced blend of love, desire, torpor, impending financial ruin, investor faith and generosity, Lone Star beer, creative connections, and the need, however improbable, to ascribe some meaning to our rapid and frenzied times. There was also a sense of urgency to the whole endeavor. Look at NYC’s St. Mark’s Place or dot com bubble San Francisco as proof that culture can go away, or shift so drastically as to be unrecognizable.

It became clear to me that Austin was at a very similar crossroads. On one hand, the music is as good as it’s ever been. On the other hand, musicians can no longer afford to live downtown, there are midnight curfews for playing outside, and renewed noise ordinances are popping up all over the city. The concept of the “ecotone,” the metaphorical moment where nature and civilization meet, organically grew out of the issues everyone seemed to be talking about.

This will be the first of many writings that attempt to illuminate the independent filmmaking experience as I have experienced it over the course of directing ECHOTONE.

Construction, progress, noise.

We’re shooting the skeletal high-rise condos in our film as if they are characters themselves. Noisy, moving, rhythmic.

We shot the IDM duo Machine over the holiday break (Ha! Break!) as they walked through the construction sites of the soon-to-be lofts for Austin’s well-monied. The workers slammed, hammered, and drilled and Machine recorded it. They looked like two musical bandits, aiming their shotgun mics directly at the sound (music).

Machine walked along railroad tracks. A train blew by. They got as close as they could to the clanging and screeching while Rob and I filmed it all, my voice rising above the noise: “Don’t get too close to the tracks!” They were so focused.

Jonathan – the keyboardist, with his bleached white hair and Chase, down by the tracks in a placid crouch. When the train passed, they looked up at each other and smiled knowingly. Jonathan simply said, “We got it,” and they walked down the tracks with their newly-collected booty.

Machine got to work, standing before their analogue motherboard of keys, sequencers, Kaos pads, and turntables, turning the city sounds into percussive beats. With Chase living in Boston and Jonathan living in sometimes San Antonio, sometimes Austin, their meetings together are long and intense dump sessions of all the backlogged material they’d both been toying with in the previous year. Their song titles are hallucinatory dream-like portraits of parallel worlds:

‘Order in the Clockroom’
‘Andromedia’
‘Town of Machine’
or
musical sketches of poetic moments:
‘Sun Slipping
‘Balloon at My Door’

Machine photos by Kate Boswell

After a 2am lull, they launch into an industrial freakout number called ‘Moonface,’ morphing the hissing drone of the city into an undefinable cacophony. This is not exactly Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, but Machine’s music is taking us into experimental realms we haven’t yet explored. Beyond this, they are the youngest musicians to show up on-screen. Walking down Lamar, Chase marvels at how quickly the city is changing. Because they aren’t ingrained in the “scene” (a term I’m usually loathe to use), there is a freedom about the way they operate. In the grander scope of the film, they represent the young artist taking a seemingly untenable change and turning it into something beautiful.

After the New Year’s countdown is over and cracked drunk voices croon ‘Auld Lang Syne’, Machine leads us into the next chapter. Jonathan sits against the back wall. It’s incredible to hear a trained pianist make such innovative music. He traipses two genres in ECHOTONE, this IDM collision, and a more classical, stripped-down sound.

02 The Town of Machine

We recently re-recorded it as a motif for ECHOTONE, but you’ll have to wait until the film’s out to hear it.

Jonathan sits against a wall and recounts a story of the first time he ever heard a drum machine mixed with organic instruments, many years back. The band he had heard was just getting on their feet themselves.

“I had no idea what I was getting myself into,” he says.

“What was the band?” I ask.

“The Octopus Project.”

Bill Baird photographed at his studio, Baby Blue, by Daniel Perlaky

There was ease today after the relative stress of the last few days. The project challenges us every time we go out there, forces us to rapidly re-assess our preconceived ideas of people’s desires and motives.

Once the subjects in the film get past the fact that Robert and I look like Robocops with our cameras and shoulder mounts, they trust us more. Bill from the Honeybears and the Harlequins called a camera, with its intense light trained on him, “the blaster.” Red Hunter’s band simply thought they looked too much like TV cameras. Odd what YouTube and mini cell phone technology have done to people’s perceptions of larger, higher quality cameras. As if, by virtue of their quality, they aren’t authentic. That’s missing the point, I think. We all have our tools, and these are ours, and they are going to give us a beautiful final product.

It makes me wonder why a documentary of this nature hasn’t been made in recent years about ATX. I mean, low-res videos abound. Friends shooting friends. Everyone’s on camera all the time. But we’re attempting to find some shred of sense in it, with good quality image and sound. As much as I love the rawness of the Velvet Underground Quine Tapes, we want to up the quality. And trust me, we are definitely boot-strapping it. We are the definition of a skeleton crew. But I think being only a 3-4 person crew allows us to better engage with the world in front of us. We can be in the moment and follow the energy more spontaneously.

Like the way Wim Wenders filmed Houston in Paris, TX – long tracking shots across expansive banks, staring through the camera with wide-eyed wonder at a giant construction crane with a proud American flag flapping on top. A brilliant and curious German exploring the intricacies and excesses of another culture as he finds them, insidious or commonplace as we Texans might find them to be. We’re making this film not just for the people here, but for some guy named Jorg in Stockholm, who thinks people ride horses and screw sheep in Texas (I’ve been accused of both, completely straight-faced, during some of my travels.)

This is why our trips to Dallas and Houston, commencing tomorrow, will be interesting. We’ll come up for air to look at another side of Texas before we submerge back in.