Look at Our Sound

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.

Phantasmagoria

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.

South by Southwest, Money, and Noise

The famous/infamous South by Southwest Music Festival forms the climax of Echotone. The previous 75 minutes of the film are spent among the city’s musicians, journalists, photographers, developers, and politicians. It is after living in the kaleidoscope of jackhammers, dancing cranes, instruments analogue and digital, and severed fish heads that we see the rest of the world descend upon this noisy town. These four days structure the center of the music industry (“the music industry’s spring break,” some mumble). Like grackles on a spare tree they roost, bringing over $119 million into Austin’s economy and effectively shutting down the entire city.

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.

More than a Year and a Half in Pursuit

When we started filming in April 2008, we weren’t clear where we were headed. We didn’t know where or how the story would present itself. All we had to do was look up to know that something was brewing in Austin. The dozen-plus high-rise condos hung over everything, most of them just shells. I’d been hearing rueful whispers about our town:

“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.