Music Blog

All I knew was that Sufjan Stevens was going to live soundtrack a film at the Hollywood Theater. That's all it took for me to sign on for this assigment and dedicate a couple hours of my Thursday evening to sitting  in one of Portland's most unlikely neighborhoods for hip cultural happenings (the Hollywood Theater is consistently wonderful though).

I didn't know Beyond This Place was going to be a documentary.  I hadn't heard of the filmmaker, Kaleo La Belle, and thus, I definitely didn't know that he and Stevens were childhood friends from Michigan. I didn't know La Belle had made a film in 2006 about a road trip Stevens took with his brother, Marzuki, back to their hometown. I actually didn't even know that the score was a collaboation between Stevens and Castanet's songwriter Ray Raposa. 

Nope. I just knew that Sufjan was doing something in Portland and there's a mysterious force associated with this sort of occurence that automatically pushes it to the front of my calendar of events. The vast web of ignorance that accompanies this kind of blind interest might come off as being irresponsible. But, at the risk of insulting an under-appreciated pocket of Kaleo La Belle film buffs, I think it's safe to say I wasn't alone. The place was mobbed, with people standing in the aisles as the theater's 500-plus seats were filled.

The lights went down and a spotlight highlighted a small section of far stage right where there were a few guitars, a banjo, and a couple of amplifiers and music stands. Stevens and Raposa, both looking scruffy and rumpled in flannels and baseball caps, quietly took their seats to a round of golf claps and then the film started.

The original score could be described in terms of what it was: traditional, non-digetic, indie-minimalist, pretty, forgettable. But it's probably more useful and interesting to describe what it wasn't. There were no lyrically geographical, baroque pop songs (as there hasn't been for a long time now, so stop asking) or any pop songs at all in the film. Stevens' voice made appearances only in a handful of passing moments and Raposa's reedy rasp never stood in front, utilized only in a few low harmonies tucked well in the mix. There was nothing in the score reminiscent of Stevens' sprawling, disjointed orchestral suite The BQE. I didn't hear anything that resembled the twlight, moon songs of Castanets that glide from acoustic strums to ambient soundscapes. 

Honestly, if I had watched the film without knowing who the composers were, I probably wouldn't have thought it was Stevens or Raposa. I probably wouldn't have cared too much. And this isn't to say that the score was bad. In fact, the music's spare textures fit the film's movements well. The short sonic range from carefully arpeggiated guitars to quiet drone more than covered the documentary's physical settings that varied from Pacific Northwest nature to small, focused pockets of civilization. The most Sufjan/Ray thing about the score is how sedulously it ebbs and flows from organic to electronic based on the movements of the film.

So, basically, I watched Beyond This Place. It's about the filmmaker trying to reconnect with his father, Cloud Rock La Belle, after 40 years of near absence. Cloud Rock left his son and family behind when Kaleo was six years old to cycle around the country working as a "psychedelic apothecary". At one point Cloud Rock says he was, "stoned for 40 years" stretching a 1960's LSD trip into the present day. In an attempt to reconnect, Kaleo and Cloud Rock go on a cycling trip across the Pacific Northwest and that's the driving narrative of the documentary.

On one hand, the film is an analysis of the bond between a father and his son. It asks what is this bond made of and how do these parts influence who these people become. This theme only captured my attention to a point. I was more intrigued by the way the son, the filmmaker and narrator, depicted his father and the intention he had for an onlooking audience. In the film, Kaleo is clearly deeply hurt by his father's long, conscious absence in his life. So when Cloud Rock and his friends are on screen explaining his individualist, post-hippie philosophy about embracing life by way of nomadic roaming and psychadelic drugs, it's easy to cast him into a world of shame and negativity. Too easy. The film's voice is biased to a point where I found myself re-intonating each assertion from black to white to gray. I wondered what the rest of the audience was thinking.

Maybe they were still trying to figure out the point of the live soundtrack. And here I am, all of sudden, trying to be a film reviewer. Which together sum up the value of this experience to me. Something inside me asking, "why are you over thinking this?"

Tagged: live review