Presented by The Parkway and Sound Unseen
Wednesday, April 15, 2026
6:30 pm Doors // 7:30 pm Music + Film
All Ages
$15 ($20.21 w. taxes/fees) Advance General Admission
$20 ($23 w. taxes/fees) At The Door General Admission
Ticket purchases are final and non-refundable
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Just in time for Tax Day: the 1924 silent film, He Who Gets Slapped. The great Lon Chaney is HE, a tortured clown whose signature act is receiving an endless series of slaps to the face. Unbeknownst to the cheering crowd, however, HE is disgraced scientist Paul Beaumont who, robbed of his research and publicly humiliated by the evil Baron Regnard (Marc McDermott), has spent the last five years intricately staging a most bizarre and twisted revenge.
The film will be live-scored with a performance featuring new work by Paris 1919, the musical collective of celebrated composer Chris Strouth and select Twin Cities musicians, including Natalie Nowytski (a classically-trained vocalist-turned-folk music geek who sings in 50+ languages and 12+ distinct vocal styles), guitarist Kent Militzer, and multi-instrumentalist David J. Russ, and Terrell X D'avion (Carnage The Executioner) one of America's premier beat boxers and a legendary figure of midwestern Hip-Hop. Strouth’s work has been described as “aggressively ambient,” and this will mark his sixth silent film score for the Parkway. Presented in conjunction with Sound Unseen.
Originally a 1914 Russian stageplay by expressionist author Leonid Andreyev, He Who Gets Slapped became a hit on Broadway in 1922 and was immediately targeted by Louis B. Mayer as the first project at his new studio, soon to be amalgamated as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM.) Directed by Victor Sjöström (The Phantom Carriage, The Wind), Chaney’s tragic and deeply haunting performance as HE is seminal to a grand tradition of scary movie clowns.
Chris Strouth’s roots as a musician and electronic artist go back to the 1980s, when he got his start as part of the punk art collective around Rifle Sport Gallery in downtown Minneapolis. Since then, he has become a producer, scenemaker, and composer of complex, immersive works, often written for large-scale ensembles or collectives such as Future Perfect Sound System and Paris 1919, with whom he has released four albums and an EP since 2011, most recently 2022's Future Archaeology.
The music Strouth creates defies easy categorization and, as with many forms of art, sticking a label on it is perhaps unhelpful — to listeners and to the music itself. Instead, it transcends genre. DJ and electronic musician Kid Koala has praised Strouth's work as "sometimes futuristic, sometimes nostalgic, but always evocative, dwelling in a perfectly focused space between tranquility and chaos. It is the type of music that is a screenwriter's dream."
Paris 1919's music can be jaggedly buzzing and sinister, ethereal and serene, melancholy and stately. There is at times an almost science-fictional quality that seems to blend the mechanical with the organic. There are echoes of the industrial throb of Coil or Throbbing Gristle, Ennio Morricone's film score for The Thing, Enoesque ambience, the Red Room sequences in David Lynch's Twin Peaks, Pink Floyd's more cosmic psychedelia, silent-film innovator Georges Méliès, and more. Still, if a genre label is needed, Strouth's emphasis on digital manipulation and sometimes dark, unsettling atmospherics congenially resonates with both modern neo-classical and ambient drone music, even if it won't fit neatly into any one box.
