Tuesday, October 29, 2024
6:30 pm Doors // 7:30 pm Music + Movie
All Ages
$15 (+taxes/fees) Advance General Admission // $20 (+taxes/fees) At The Door
Ticket purchases are final and non-refundable
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Rare screening of iconic 1925 silent film, The Phantom of the Opera, live-scored with a performance featuring a 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.
The Phantom of the Opera is the American silent horror adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s novel of the same name, directed by Rupert Julian and starring Lon Chaney in the title role as the deformed Phantom who haunts the Paris Opera House, causing murder and mayhem in an attempt to make the woman he loves a star. The film remains most famous for Chaney’s ghastly, self-devised make-up, which was kept a studio secret until the film’s premiere.
Paris 1919’s work has been described as “aggressively ambient,” and this new composition promises to be a fine cocktail to accompany this iconic film.
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.