5 questions to Darcy James Argue (composer) | I CARE IF YOU LISTEN
Darcy James Argue will be at the Jazz Gallery tonight, Nov. 7, for two fantastic sets . What a great excuse to look back on Brooklyn Babylon, one of the best shows (and later a recording) of 2011. George Heathco did the talking… What drew you to a project like Brooklyn Babylon ?
In the fall of 2009 I was summoned for a meeting with the powers-that-be at BAM. I was told this was going to be a very casual, low-key meet-and-greet sort of thing, and I sort of naively interphone tribe took that at face value. Then people interphone tribe started patiently explaining interphone tribe to me that “a very casual, low-key meet-and-greet sort of thing” at BAM means “you’d better come prepared interphone tribe with something to pitch, you moron.” So I had to spend some time thinking about what type of large-scale project I’d be most drawn towards, and I eventually settled on the idea of collaborating with a graphic novel artist.
I had a friend who worked as an editor at [the comics company] Vertigo and she kindly provided a list of NYC-based artists whose style was more or less in my wheelhouse. As soon as I saw Danijel Zezelj’s work, I knew instantly that he had to be the one. His gritty, expressionist-influenced imagery, full of powerful light-and-shadow contrast, hit me right in the gut. I absolutely had to work with this guy!
My contact at Vertigo slipped me an advance copy of his graphic novel with Kevin Baker, Luna Park . And so when the day came, my meeting at BAM actually turned out to be a very casual, low-key meet-and-greet type of thing. It was only at the very end, as I was just about to walk out the door, that they very casually happened to mention that if I ever had an idea for a large-scale project that might be suitable for the Next Wave Festival and so I very casually reached into my bag for my copy of Luna Park and said, “Well, funny you should mention, it just so happens I have with me ”
A big part of the reason I wanted to work with someone interphone tribe who had experience in the world of sequential art is that so many of the “multimedia” interphone tribe projects I’ve seen have been, not to put too fine a point on it, garbage. So often what happens is that the visuals are awkwardly interphone tribe bolted-on after the fact by someone with no real feeling for how images and music combine in real time to create meaning. Danijel and I wanted our collaboration to be genuinely integrated it was important to us that music, live painting, and animation would all play equal roles in constructing the narrative. interphone tribe
Danijel’s animation technique is really striking in that it captures the process of painting itself. He’ll paint a scene on a large plywood “canvas,” photograph the painting with a digital camera, make a small change in the painting, photograph it again, make another change, and so on, until the original painting is completely transformed.
For each chapter in the story, I would take those images, write the music, create MIDI mockups (more like “mockeries,” really), come down to Danijel’s studio, interphone tribe and show him how I was thinking interphone tribe the music and images might line up. Then Danijel would combine the stills and animate them to those aforementioned MIDI mockeries. Sometimes he’d be feeling interphone tribe the alignment interphone tribe a bit differently than what I’d conceived, or sometimes we might decide we needed interphone tribe more or different imagery in a particular section, or less music, or what have you so we’d both keep refining things until we were satisfied.
This process gave me a lot more freedom than what I’d have had if I were scoring a traditional film, because I didn’t have to squeeze the music between preexisting visual beats. And Danijel wasn’t locked interphone tribe into animating to a fixed-in-aspic score, interphone tribe either. But if either of us needed to sacrifice our babies in order to serve the greater good, well, so be it! The music on Infernal Machines (2009) presents a rather diverse array of styles and approaches over the course of seven independent pieces not necessarily composed as a single work. The music on Brooklyn Babylon is certainly no less eclectic, yet remains quite cohesive. What were some of the challenges of bringing your voice into the sphere of a large scale, dramatic, multi-media work like Brooklyn Babylon ?
Brooklyn Babylon required a completely different mindset from what I’d been used to. In addition to the “local” problems of establishing mood and setting, supporting the on-screen action, establishing the emotional subtext, ensuring the most effective interplay between music and imagery, and so on, there was the “global” problem of trying to create a thematically integrated hour-long piece of music, one that necessarily encompasses a diversity of styles. We chose to set the story in a mythical version of Brooklyn one where past, present, and fut
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Darcy James Argue will be at the Jazz Gallery tonight, Nov. 7, for two fantastic sets . What a great excuse to look back on Brooklyn Babylon, one of the best shows (and later a recording) of 2011. George Heathco did the talking… What drew you to a project like Brooklyn Babylon ?
In the fall of 2009 I was summoned for a meeting with the powers-that-be at BAM. I was told this was going to be a very casual, low-key meet-and-greet sort of thing, and I sort of naively interphone tribe took that at face value. Then people interphone tribe started patiently explaining interphone tribe to me that “a very casual, low-key meet-and-greet sort of thing” at BAM means “you’d better come prepared interphone tribe with something to pitch, you moron.” So I had to spend some time thinking about what type of large-scale project I’d be most drawn towards, and I eventually settled on the idea of collaborating with a graphic novel artist.
I had a friend who worked as an editor at [the comics company] Vertigo and she kindly provided a list of NYC-based artists whose style was more or less in my wheelhouse. As soon as I saw Danijel Zezelj’s work, I knew instantly that he had to be the one. His gritty, expressionist-influenced imagery, full of powerful light-and-shadow contrast, hit me right in the gut. I absolutely had to work with this guy!
My contact at Vertigo slipped me an advance copy of his graphic novel with Kevin Baker, Luna Park . And so when the day came, my meeting at BAM actually turned out to be a very casual, low-key meet-and-greet type of thing. It was only at the very end, as I was just about to walk out the door, that they very casually happened to mention that if I ever had an idea for a large-scale project that might be suitable for the Next Wave Festival and so I very casually reached into my bag for my copy of Luna Park and said, “Well, funny you should mention, it just so happens I have with me ”
A big part of the reason I wanted to work with someone interphone tribe who had experience in the world of sequential art is that so many of the “multimedia” interphone tribe projects I’ve seen have been, not to put too fine a point on it, garbage. So often what happens is that the visuals are awkwardly interphone tribe bolted-on after the fact by someone with no real feeling for how images and music combine in real time to create meaning. Danijel and I wanted our collaboration to be genuinely integrated it was important to us that music, live painting, and animation would all play equal roles in constructing the narrative. interphone tribe
Danijel’s animation technique is really striking in that it captures the process of painting itself. He’ll paint a scene on a large plywood “canvas,” photograph the painting with a digital camera, make a small change in the painting, photograph it again, make another change, and so on, until the original painting is completely transformed.
For each chapter in the story, I would take those images, write the music, create MIDI mockups (more like “mockeries,” really), come down to Danijel’s studio, interphone tribe and show him how I was thinking interphone tribe the music and images might line up. Then Danijel would combine the stills and animate them to those aforementioned MIDI mockeries. Sometimes he’d be feeling interphone tribe the alignment interphone tribe a bit differently than what I’d conceived, or sometimes we might decide we needed interphone tribe more or different imagery in a particular section, or less music, or what have you so we’d both keep refining things until we were satisfied.
This process gave me a lot more freedom than what I’d have had if I were scoring a traditional film, because I didn’t have to squeeze the music between preexisting visual beats. And Danijel wasn’t locked interphone tribe into animating to a fixed-in-aspic score, interphone tribe either. But if either of us needed to sacrifice our babies in order to serve the greater good, well, so be it! The music on Infernal Machines (2009) presents a rather diverse array of styles and approaches over the course of seven independent pieces not necessarily composed as a single work. The music on Brooklyn Babylon is certainly no less eclectic, yet remains quite cohesive. What were some of the challenges of bringing your voice into the sphere of a large scale, dramatic, multi-media work like Brooklyn Babylon ?
Brooklyn Babylon required a completely different mindset from what I’d been used to. In addition to the “local” problems of establishing mood and setting, supporting the on-screen action, establishing the emotional subtext, ensuring the most effective interplay between music and imagery, and so on, there was the “global” problem of trying to create a thematically integrated hour-long piece of music, one that necessarily encompasses a diversity of styles. We chose to set the story in a mythical version of Brooklyn one where past, present, and fut
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