Live musical accompaniment to porn films
The PornOrchestra project is devoted to "composing and improvising new soundtracks for existing porn films." The new music will be performed as live accompaniment during screenings in the Bay Area. artsflow interviews Shannon Mariemont about the project.
So the PornOrchestra in this incarnation is attempting to radically reinterpret pornographic soundtrack, first by simply being present; secondly by creating sounds that recontextualize the visual events; thirdly by inviting people from diverse backgrounds to reflect openly on this enormous, and enormously closeted, cultural form. One of the participating musicians told me for him this project is "an experiment in subverting the commercial element of the original to present the inner world." Another mused that it could just be "really hot, or really evil, or both and sick, or maybe a little beautiful."
PornOrchestra's premiere performance will be held March 22 in Oakland. (Thanks, Chris.)
Another group is doing something similar at the incredibly fantastic Alamo Drafthouse theater-restaurant in Daze Reader's hometown of Austin. The troupe led by Buzz Moran performs live dialogue, music and sound effects to accompany movies screened with the original soundtrack turned off. They started with 1970s kung fu films, as described in this local alt-weekly profile.
While the Kung Fu Masterpiece Theater's closest comparable antecedent may be Woody Allen's 1966 Japanese spy spoof What's Up, Tiger Lily?, Moran and company are actually doing something quite different here, deriving their humor not from overdubbed gags but from a combination of virtuosic foley work and a poker-faced reading of the films' original English dialogue, inscrutable translation quirks and all. And so, as the Golden Arm Trio's Graham Reynolds performs an original live score to the film, Moran and his fellow actors Shannon McCormick, Chad Nicols, and Chris Meister reverentially intone such awkward lines as "He won't escape, not after I blast him with my great undefeatable solar ray!" while simultaneously providing sound effects through such unlikely methods as leaping up and down in troughs of gravel, shaking huge sheets of galvanized metal, and banging coconut halves on a thin strip of wood.
The group later applied the same approach with 1970s porno films, starting with Disco Dolls in Hot Skin 3-D. (Unfortunately, during the run of Disco Dolls, Alamo management was informed that Texas law doesn't allow pornographic films to be screened in establishments that serve alcohol. This forced the theater to substitute their original 35mm hardcore print with an edited Cinemaxesque video version.) Next month, Moran and company will screen and perform the porn parody Fantasex Island. "By some odd coincidence, all of Mr. Rourke's guests on Fantasex Island seem to have fantasies involving sexual intercourse. What are the odds?"
how odd that NOWHERE is therre a mention of the actual FILMS being "re-soundtracked" - my suspicion is that they are speaking of porno videos, ---- the great films of the 70's often had very specific pieces of music in mind, sometimes not poperly licensed, and therefore didn;t make it to the video versions put out in the 80's. POOLE's BIJOU has great Led Zeppelin music; DESIMONE's Confessions of a Male Groupie had several fantastic pop songs, and the filming and editing were in sync with the music, an intergral part of the film. Many of Hand-In_hand's early films used original music, as did some of Arthur J Bressan's.
