Town of Machine

Originally written December 2008 during the heat of production, I’ve updated this blog with new photos and music. – NC

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.”

In and Out of the Glowing City

A luminous day with Bill Baird – a 360-degree artist. I call him this because he can express himself from seemingly every angle. He can speak articulately about his life’s pursuit, he can draw, paint, play multiple instruments, toss down lyrics in moments flat, and thrive in the studio, stealthily going after the sound he knows is on the tip of his mind. It’s bigger than just the music. We filmed him for half of the day, touching on topics from urban development to culture hounds, from his vegetable oil-fueled car to Walt Whitman. He talked about Soundteam being picked up by Capitol records and painted out a hilarious scene of a some guy (maybe A&R) with a backwards baseball cap courting the band around a table with a $500 bottle of Dom Perignon. That was the moment he looked around and realized there was some corporate trouble afoot.

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.