Instant Soundtrack!
March 1, 2008 at 12:17 p.m.
The sound system at the Forrest Theater in The Tiger hotel was a constant nuisance for composers T. Griffin and Ionic Furjanic (try saying that one five times) at the Instant Soundtrack! Panel discussion. However despite the technical difficulties that made their music come through fuzzy, the duo kept their cool and were able to make their musical philosophy and process come through clearly.
Although Griffin and Furjanic met the night before and had never seen each other’s work, they complimented each other well in the discussion. Griffin showed his current work in progress, New Orleans, Mon Amour. The drama by Michael Almereyda pays homage to the 1950’s film Hiroshima, Mon Amour and sets a tumultuous love story against a post-Katrina backdrop.
Griffin explained that Almereyda wanted to stay away from Dixieland brass bands that the director felt were played out. Griffin felt that if a soundtrack was going to say New Orleans, it had to deal with the musical baggage of the city, which to him, was horns. Griffin said he tried to make the music “horny” but fresh by combining distorted brass with a musical representation of the wind in New Orleans to create a pallet of colors he called a “horn cloud.”
Griffin explained that he felt it was important to create an atmosphere of musical expectations so an audience can be shaped by the music without being manipulated by a sudden change in musical style. “When I think music is really working, I feel like it
Is emanating from the scenes on film and not just sitting on top,” said Griffin.
Furjanic showed his current work on a documentary called Arusi. The film follows a young Iranian man who is engaged to an American woman and as a way to humanize the relationship between Iran and the US. Furjanic showed a sequence chronicling the events that lead up to the 1979 hostage crisis and showed how he came up with the music he eventually settled on using. Furjanic played a sample of Iranian folk music that he then set over an aggressive hip-hop beat to reflect the anger and tension represented on screen.
-Ricky O'Bannon
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