M3DICINE SHOW CIN3MA

Excerpt from interview with Echo/Echo magazine…

music is a big part of your films

music is a big part of film period. if you know your film history you know that right from the beginning the earliest filmmakers were making attempts to synchronize sound with image. Edison, the Lumieres, all of them. It took until the Jazz Singer to really kick out the jams, but although that is credited with being the first sound film, that isn’t really true at all. And films were always accompanied by some sort of sound. Even if it was only some guy on the house piano. But there were also filmed stage plays where real people would stand behind the screen or off to one side and say the lines, sort of the first dubbing attempts. But yeah, music is a big part of all Red Scream Films. Prison of the Psychotic Damned has an original score, FrightWorld is wall to wall with music by about a dozen different bands, Red Scream Vampyres is looking at heaving a heavy world beat sound. Terminal Descent is more punk and industrial. I’m thinking Nosferatu will be more classical. But, the scripts were all written with a definate sound in mind.

music is also a big part of your life

oh yeah. i was brought up on the radio. my people were radio people not television watchers. my dad was always listening to old school country, like Hank Snow and Hank Williams and Johnny Cash and Earl Scruggs. the real stuff you know, not that nashville vegas crap. Kitty Welles. I fucking love Patsy Cline. You listen to some of her stuff…man, that is pure movie music…makes me think of dark streets and lone figures and somebody is hurting and somebody is going to die. My aunt was a teenager and she listened to all that top of the pops Beatles and Stones and The Who and like that. And we just always had music playing. 

do you like musicals?

not really. I mean, I like the busby berkley stuff, the golddiggers series. 42nd Street rocks! That stuff is pure movie fantasy eye candy for the depression era stuff. Amazingly snappy dialogue and dance routines and set design that was like, you are looking at that and thinking, were those guys on acid? you can’t make ‘em like that anymore. Then I like the modern musicals, like Cabaret and All that Jazz and even Across the Universe. But the inbetween stuff, like seven brothers for seven sisters or whatever, all that rogers and hammerstein stuff, gak.Hate it. I hear Julie Andrews start singing the hills are alive and I reach for the rocket launcher.

you were in a band.

how do you know this shit?

w*14

how do you know that?

Ron Wieszchek told me.

Oh man, yeah, we were in W*14 together, we were W*14.

explain W*14

That was…punk was burning itself out, new wave was rearing its ugly head, but there were also some decent electronic bands starting to come around, like Gary Numan and of course I was a long time Kraftwerk fan at that time. Plus Casio and Yamaha and a number of other companies were coming out with these tiny cheap keyboards and drum machines that you could get for a couple hundred bucks and with some minor recording tricks, make sound like you actually knew how to play them (laughs). What have you heard?

He said it was the stuff you recorded on his 4-track in his basement.

Oh yeah, that was, like a demo tape really. We were both writing music. Him at his house in Rochester and me in Buffalo. He had a Amiga computer and a Commodore 128 and music programs for both. I had a little Casio that surprisingly had a great organ sound and a Yamaha monophonic synthesizer and some sort of drum machine. We would write our own little tunes then get together and record them. He had a 4-track reel to reel. That stuff, that was like, when a band gets together and starts writing music and lays down some sample tracks. That’s what that was. The idea to take it to the next step, get into a studio, get some real musicians to add a few layers, and put out a record or cassette. But that never happened. Works, wives…whatever. I love Beaver Island. That is the funniest song ever. Ron wrote that. His stuff was always more toward the bizarre or humorous side. My stuff was more proto-goth. Figures in Black in the Distance. Did you hear the 45?

No

I did that without Ron. He was suppose to do it but, I don’t remember what happened. So I did it in a small studio on Grand Island. The owner contributed some guitar riffs. It actully got some college airplay and I believe was a minor hit in Japan. Falls to Ruins backed with, something else. I don’t remember. Laughs. The 45 is more like the next level, where we were going to take the demo stuff. Wish that we had. What did you think?

I liked it. Beaver Island is funny. It was like, like Beach Boys filtered through a robot or something. And the one you mentioned, Figures in Black in the Distance. And a couple others. Very interesting. It reminded me of early Depech Mode.

Absolutely. Laughs.