The instrumental rock group composes the soundtrack of this milestone in the history of cinema that has just turned 100 and will perform it live while it is being screened
The greatest exponent of German cinematographic expressionism, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , has just turned 100. And its validity remains intact, thanks to the hypnotic power that its images still exert and initiatives such as Café Kino that, after the success of the projections of Battleship Potemkin and Metropolis with current soundtracks played live, commissioned the rock group Toundra instrumental put music to the film directed by Robert Wiene.
For Esteban Girón (Navia, Asturias, 1987), guitarist of the group, the Café Kino proposal in December 2018 was the opportunity to fulfill a dream, "we put the blanket to the head and instead of improvising or playing issues we wanted make an ad hoc soundtrack for the movie. " What was going to be a single projection has become something broader, which will also be published in disco format and that will be the axis of a tour that now reaches the Theaters of the Canal but will also pass through Zaragoza, Barcelona, Germany and Gijón .
How was the soundtrack composition process? We had to do it in a very short time and that led us to be bolder. When you compose for Toundra, the spectrum of things you can do is infinite, but not here, because we were conditioned by a work of art recognized worldwide and with enormous prestige and that implies a great responsibility. Besides, you do something new, which may be more pressure, but deep down it is also a release. It has been a way to turn the tortilla around, because people have always told us that our music evokes images and what we have done now is to generate music from Toundra from the images of Dr. Caligari's cabinet. Have you ever seen the movie? Christmas is a period we don't turn around, so we decided to lock each one in his house with the guitar and the movie. We also made joint views and so we were getting ideas. We went on tour in January and February, we returned, and in March and April we locked ourselves five days a week in the rehearsal room with the film projected on a wall, watching it again and again and generating the soundtrack for acts. That suited us very well, because that way we could separate work units with a beginning and an end. The film is like a spiral and each of the six acts is one more turn. It seems a proposal that could have come out of you, given the kind of atmospheric, almost oppressive music that you do since your beginnings ... We had always been told that we made very cinematographic music and why didn't we get to compose soundtracks. In the end that makes a dent and you end up thinking that it would be good to do it, until it becomes something that makes you very excited. The film has an imaginary and a diegetic world so powerful that from the beginning we saw that it was going to marry perfectly with our music. I had studied the film in the Audiovisual Communication career and knew that it was not horror, but rather an alert about the dangers of ideologies that grow in the interwar period, with a script written by people who had participated in the First World War.The film has an imaginary and a diegetic world so powerful that from the beginning we saw that it would marry perfectly with our music
Although I speak of that time, the film also has a very current reading ... In fact in our head there was an almost immediate parallel between that time and what we are living now with the rise of ideologies, social agents and political parties that what They want to take us to a place that is more scary than Dr. Caligari's own cabinet. For us, ethical-political discourse has always been something important, from the way we do things and pay the people we work with to our consumption habits. Since we do not have lyrics or an explicit political discourse, whenever the opportunity arises we are excited to shed some light on any kind of injustice.When you play live accompanying the screening of the film, is there room for improvisation? No, Everything is very measured, we go with the metronome of the images. There are guitar solos that do allow you to get a little out of that, but everything is quite measured because we didn't want to do an improvisation. Since we were presented with the opportunity to make a soundtrack we wanted to do it big. We saw the opportunity to score a goal and we wanted to put it through the squad. As for composers of soundtracks, do you have the same tastes? We agree quite little. The great common reference is Mogwai and they have made, for example, the wonderful soundtrack of the Zidane documentary of the Real Madrid match against Villareal, which we have all seen a lot of times. But then I really like Sonic Youth and Neil Young, who are artists who have worked in the cinema and are not great references for any of my partners. The album I have heard the most this year is the soundtrack of Max Richter for La amiga studa , the HBO series. As a result of this project, do you dare to propose to any director the possibility of making a soundtrack for your next film? We are always open to collaborate. Yes there have been opportunities to do things, including advertising, but we have always been called by people who needed everything very quickly and we have a very busy schedule. It takes Caligari five months to do it, we are not studio musicians, we are a band that meets in the rehearsal room and has other tempos. The things you do slowly are the ones you enjoy most. Are you going to recover at some point other projects such as Exquirla, with El Niño de Elche, or was it something timely? It was a concrete project. We have trouble staying to eat a stew, as to make another album. I don't think that will happen again. What are you waiting for in this 2020? We have a lot of dates like Toundra and I suppose that by the end of the year we will have composed and recorded a new album that will be released in 2021. Maybe that will be the time to hang the boots.According to the criteria of
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