How A Movie Became Part Of The Band

The subtitles appeared first: ​“Behold! The portals of darkness are open and the shadows of the dead hunt over the earth…” Ragged skeletons rode bony steeds through plumes of greasy smoke while an angel with a flaming sword and a devil with leathery wings fought for dominion over the world. Jeff Cedrone leaned into his keyboard and produced moody chords. Drummer Peter Riccio tapped on a cymbal while Bob Gorry on guitar and Conor Perreault on tapes and other noise-producing gear joined in. I had an upright bass and a bow, and first just hit the same note as the chord, to reinforce it. But as the combined textures of the other musicians made things more dense, more complicated, I varied it up as well.

I slid high into the next note I wanted, then swooped back down again. The sound kept developing as Cedrone, Riccio, Gorry and Perreault settled in. Before long I was moving away from producing a thick bass note, and moving toward creating textures of my own, making more bow noise, employing harmonics, making it warblier, spookier. With the sound of the ensemble now moving on its own, Cedrone switched from keyboard to guitar, to piano. Together, Light Upon Blight — with me sitting in and along for the ride — proceeded to create its next set of ideas, following and constantly inspired by F.W. Murnau’s 1926 movie Faust, to which the group was providing a live, improvised score.

On Friday, the New Haven-based improvisors’ group Light Upon Blight returned to Best Video in Hamden for the fourth year in a row, in what has become a tradition to perform a score to a famous — and famously creepy — silent movie for Halloween. In previous years, Cedrone had picked Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Haxan, and Carnival of Souls.

“While doing research Faust would often come up, but yeah, it’s less popular … and I’m not sure why,” Cedrone said. ​“I had not seen it until it became a contender to potentially score, but once I did I was very impressed by the visuals and storytelling. Man, is it visually stunning.”

One reason Faust might not be as famous as Nosferatu or Dr. Caligari is length. While those clock in at under an hour and a half, Faust stretches to nearly two hours. This meant, for Light Upon Blight, that maybe some sort of strategy was in order.

I’m a regularly gigging musician, but I had never played with Light Upon Blight. I had seen the group perform a few times, and liked what I heard. I liked the band’s ability to churn up big, cantankerous grooves, and I liked the interplay of the instruments. I liked that the group enjoyed switching up the lineup of the band (when Gorry asked if I was interested in joining them, I readily assented). But aside from a few far-flung experiences over the years, I hadn’t played a lot of fully improvised music, and never for two hours straight.

We scheduled two rehearsals, one about a month before the show and one a week before it, that would consist of run-thoughs of the entire movie. Two days before the first rehearsal, Cedrone revealed that he’d done some thinking about it. For the movie’s introduction, he’d mapped out an approach that would first feature him on synthesizer and Perreault on tapes and noise. I was to join in on bowed bass (this instruction meant that I had to, in fact, at last buy a bass bow after three years of owning and playing an upright bass). Drums were to be sparse. In the second scene, Cedrone imagined us being more lively. A third scene was to settle down.

And then? ​“Ebb and flow for the rest,” Cedrone suggested. ​“We should be very conscious about pacing ourselves…. There should be many moments when you’re not playing and often times when only one person is playing and/or duos, and/or trios. There will be times when we’re all playing heavy and loudly, but these times will only be effective if the opposite happens more often throughout the evening. Create moods, textures, themes, and the occasional groove. Be brooding.”

Would it be enough to get us through two hours?

We met at Gorry’s house and set up a computer monitor so we could all see the movie and one another. We made a few jokes. We warmed up a bit. Then we got going.

Cedrone’s planned moody chords at the beginning of the movie gave us a place to start. We joined him, not quite as he’d planned, but soon we were all playing. Riccio then led with a rhythm that I joined him on. With that foundation, Cedrone, Gorry, and Perreault could build something bigger, full of energy. We built a piece of music that sounded pretty good. Then I worried that maybe we would be stuck there, and I started talking apart what I had made. I heard the others follow suit. Soon we were doing what Cedrone described as ​“ebb and flow.” There were times I switched from bass to violin. There were times I didn’t play at all. I just waited for an opening. Then, for inspiration, I turned to the screen itself. What was the music I wanted to hear with the scene I was watching? I tried to play it. My favorite moments in the score we created were a hushed duet between Perreault and myself that the others gave us the space for, until it was clear that more elements were needed; and a full-on fusion jam in an odd time signature that brought us close to the end. Then Cedrone brought back a slight variation on the theme that he had started with, and we were able to end the movie as we began it, except with a sense of triumph.

It was a lot of fun. We all agreed it went pretty well. We also agreed we didn’t need another rehearsal. It was better to keep it a little uncertain.

So on Friday evening I showed up at Best Video with very little memory of anything we had played, except for the motif that Cedrone had started with. We got our instruments and equipment hooked up and tuned. The audience arrived. And we started again.

As before, the opening figure was more than enough to get the music moving. As we built the music up, elaborated on it, and took it apart, Riccio moved us to the next idea by introducing a steady beat that I helped anchor on bass. Cedrone moved from keyboard to piano, leaving the guitar field, for the time being, to Gorry. This proved fertile ground. With this setup we moved through rhythmic, melodic, and textural ideas. Cedrone switched to guitar and we kept moving. Riccio and I threw rhythms back and forth, then began to take them apart. Things began to quiet down, which was fine — it was part of the ebb and flow.

Then, for a slightly scary second, none of us were making any sound. We exchanged glances. It was all right that no one was playing. But we couldn’t not play forever. We were, after all, supposed to be playing a score.

Perreault introduced tape noise, and there was a sense of the pulse quickening again. I switched from bass to violin. It made sense; it was a quiet moment, a chance for a new sound. But what to play?

I looked at the scene on the screen, which was rapidly descending in one the movie’s many phantasmagoric passages, scenes of hazy nightmares. In that second, the movie functioned like another member of the band. All the content and emotional cues we needed were there. It reminded me of an approach I’d developed in rehearsal, to draw on the Eastern European music I knew, its vocal way with musical phrases, its emotionality, its eerie tonality. For a couple minutes, Perreault and I shared a duet — our first of two — and then the others joined again.

From there on in, we were on steady footing, swapping chaos and calm, breaking into smaller groups as one or the other of us laid out for a while to give the other musicians more space. Two memories of the evening in particular stand out. The first was another moment in which Perreault and I traded not even notes, but textures, like raspy breaths. The second memory involved a point near the end of the movie where, I am pretty sure, we were all playing in different time signatures. Riccio was playing in 4/4 time, though a complex version of it, while I was insisting on playing in an odd time signature — that Eastern European thing again — and Cedrone, Gorry, and Perreault were all laying things on top of this that made it complicated but not just messy. Somehow we were still on a steady pulse. There were really few other places we could go, musically. The movie neared its conclusion, and Cedrone brought us home, back to the beginning.

The movie itself ends with the word ​“love.” Which is pretty much the word I’d use to describe the feeling of playing, both in the moment, and after, when we lingered with audience members to talk about it — as if players and audience alike had experienced the same thing.