We’re all familiar with the admonition to hush our voices and silence our cell phones before a show. But what about the time before the show ~ the gathering time before the previews? In the U.S., the average preview time is now 23 minutes, prefaced by perhaps ten minutes of pre-preview features. Any sense of anticipation is sublimated by advertisements; gone are the days when one could enter an empty theatre and gauge the excitement of the crowd as the seats slowly filled, listening to the bleed-through from adjoining auditoriums. The Cinema Show captures this sense, along with echoes of post-film conversation, standing in the cold while a friend lights a cigarette, discussing dialogue and diners. The album is a love letter to the cinema as opposed to movies: the entire experience, the love affair of the event from gathering to post-coital glow. The Cinema Show‘s cinematic antecedent is 2003’s “Goodbye Dragon Inn”, a tender film that unfolds around a film being shown on the last night of a beloved theatre. A marriage of plundered soundtrack and field recording, The Cinema Show inspires a similar sense of melancholic gratitude.
The album contains four reels and an intermezzo. Adern X & Tiziano Milani created this project by recording sounds within cinemas and augmenting them with laptop loops and explorations. On the cover, one sees a man lurking above what we assume is a theatre, excluded from the crowd, yet privy to its sounds. One cannot help but imagine the artists, not where they are supposed to be, but on the roof, behind the curtain, pressed against the corners of the lobby. When hearing conversation, trains and mechanical windings, we are not entirely sure if these sounds are “pure” (for example, the subway that runs beneath the Angelika), recorded directly from movies, or added in post-production. Specific identification is difficult. According to the artists, the catlike screech in “Intermezzo” is likely a mangled theremin from an old sci-fi film.
“reel 3” contains the sounds of crickets, vinyl scratches and an elevator lift, but is noteworthy for its musical development. As the track unfolds, it turns an elegiac meditation on cinema scores and their impact. The strings rise, the heart soars, muffled fireworks explode in the background. “reel 4” uses wind chimes and light crashes to create a sense of disturbed timelessness; this time, when the strings arise, the effect is more dramatic as a result. The classical sounds melt into a bed of shortwave static and electronic beeps, setting up the final reel. The pit orchestra swells, competing with high-pitched frequencies for attention: the old and new colliding, neither surrendering an inch. Will the modern overtake the traditional, the flash consume the subtle movement of the heart and mind? The artists imply that the residue of cinematic ghosts is as powerful as the modern multiplex. (Richard Allen)
a closer listen 