Customer Reviews

Tom Verlaine and Jimmy Rip: Music for Experimental Film

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These early avant garde silent movies have been available before on DVD, and as historical documents of the experimental whimsy and edginess of the silent era, they are worthy additions to any serious film enthusiast's collection. However, these new soundtrack recordings make them even more interesting. My wife and I, with another cinephile friend, were lucky enough to see Tom Verlaine (guitar legend of the seminal band Television) and Jimmy Rip perform live at the Detroit Institute of Arts in July of 2007. They created playful and nicely crunchy (when appropriate!) musical pastiches, very aptly fitting the images on screen. I've been a fan of silent film for years, and as an assistant to the late Art Stefan (former conducter, pianist, and head of the Ann Arbor Silent Film Society) learned much about the delicate, yet loose, precision necessary to match live music to cinematic images, as they play out on the screen. Verlaine and Rip did a superb job, and were kind enough to speak with a few eager spectators afterwords. When they told me about this upcoming Kino release, my wife could barely contain herself! While I have yet to see the DVD, Kino clearly enjoys a fine reputation, and trust me : Verlaine and Rip will make these interesting films shimmer a little more brightly than they ever have before.

This is over 70 minutes of Tom Verlaine and Jimmy Rip, live, playing electric guitars. And not just jamming or noodling around - these pieces were composed to accompany these specific films, and refined over the course of many performances, playing live while the films were projected for the audience. If you are a fan of Tom Verlaine's guitar playing, you need to hear this. If you are ready to hear electric guitar playing that uses rock, jazz, and classical music as a foundation for something fresh and new, you will love this. Oh, and the seven classic short films from the 1920s are not bad either.

If you like Tom Verlaine and his insistence on being an artist instead of a pop culture icon, you'll love this work, a piece of restoration and imagination. The music was recorded live and the films, rescued from other musics, other scores, are beautiful, black and white experimental films from the old twentieth century. Tom Verlaine and Jimmy Ripp offer up a seamless musical reinterpretation of the films in their new score, and lend a new color to them, a new charm. The Fall of the House of Usher, a wildly imaginative and hallucinatory version of Poe's story, now has an electric guitar's chill running up its spine, but an orchestral guitar, a symphonic guitar, and always with Verlaine's weird backroad genius running through it. Highly recommended.