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.
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.
