Viewing Diary: The Alloy Orchestra

This weekend I was lucky enough to see the one and only Alloy Orchestra in concert for three separate, yet equally impressive shows. They are a group of three guys who devote their time to creating unconventional, driving scores to silent films, both classic and relatively unknown. Using keyboard, percussion, accordion, clarinet, a saw, and a rack of metal junk as their instruments, the Alloy has created a sound completely their own which has been hailed as some of the best live accompaniment for silent films around. I've seen them before performing their inimitable and hypnotic score to the latest and greatest restoration of Metropolis, and this most recent round of shows -- Man With a Movie Camera, Wild and Weird - a collection of early shorts, and the recently re-discovered German expressionist masterpiece, From Morn to Midnight -- was just as memorable. But anybody who claims to be any kind of film snob, design freak, culture buff, or music geek needs to have Metropolis on their To Do list, because it is unforgettable.

What I like most about seeing the Alloy in action is walking away feeling that I've just been privy to a new, private-turned-public interpretation of films which change with every new musical score. Silent films can bear the stigma of being boring or outdated, but that is only because oftentimes they are married with music that is there to support the visual and not necessarily stand on its own. The Alloy do something different. Their music is free-standing, and thereby only enhanced when paired with the film it was written for. When I watch a silent film by myself, I can use the music as an interpretive tool. But when I have the driving vamp on the piano, and clanging of metal junk, and the eerie strains of the saw to work with, there are two creative hard-hitters to work with.


The live-music-with-film event is a special thing which used to be commonplace. In cinema's early days, a film would be projected while a stock accompanist would play along, often improvising, on a piano in the theatre. There was an immediacy to the viewing and aesthetic experience which has become a rare thing in the age of the multiplex. The Alloy's scores effectively remind me of the fact that witnessing the performance of inspired creativity has become a privileged thing. Watching them watch the screen and taking their musical cues from visual events (I think) validates my adherence to viewing-as-creative-inspiration. Films act as my aural and visual soundtrack when creating artwork, and it's a treat seeing others actively share what the film has evoked from them.