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This blog post was contributed by Max Willens, ZIO's Music Channel Assistant.

No Age @ The New Museum
10/16/09

Ever since the L.A.-based duo of Dean Spunt and Randy Randall helped put Los Angeles back on the map as an indie hotbed, they've shown that they aren't afraid to try new things.

In the last year alone, they've designed t-shirts and sneakers, they've covered Björk, they've been on tour, and they've managed to crank out a new EP, Losing Feelings, that's won them even more supporters.

But on Friday night at the New Museum, in front of a strange mix of teenaged fans and middle-aged art enthusiasts, the band became something else entirely: film scorers.

As part of the Museum's new monthly series, Get Weird, Spunt and Randall performed an alternate score to Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1988 film, The Bear, a touching yet unflinching story about a bear cub that's forced to make its way through the wild without its mother. The film features very little dialogue, and there are only a handful of scenes featuring humans. The majority of the action depicts a young animal simply trying to survive, and Spunt and Randall made that journey something to marvel at. From the opening titles onward, murmuring then chiming guitar notes and a ringing tide of feedback imbued the on-screen action with mysterious energy.

The events of the film's opening scene, in which the cub's mother accidentally dies while trying to feed him, might have been tragic, but the glimmering, oversized sounds framed it as a part of nature. Even in more mundane moments, like the cub's walk through the hills of Alaska, a neverending sense of wonder emanated from Spunt and Randall's music; the clean, wide-open tones and steady washes of noise made it seem more like the film was about nature than the film's title character.

Despite the lack of dialogue and the film's methodical pace, the band's score hugged the action instead of dominating it. In a few key moments, however, it added an adrenaline rush. The bear cub's enemies each had a kind of leitmotif, and from the muffled, backward speech of the hunters to the beeping, pixellated lioness's theme, each seemed like a horrible intrusion into the cub's world. During climactic chase scenes, Spunt set aside the mixing board and synthesizer he spent most of the film hunched over and provided arresting, unnerving thunderclaps on the drums.

This was not the first time Spunt and Randall have done something like this (they performed the same score a few months earlier at the Silent Film Center, in Los Angeles), though at times it felt fresh and uncertain. Stray blasts of sound that had nothing to do with the on-screen action cropped up occasionally, and once or twice Spunt failed to alter the on-screen dialogue. 

But aside from these miscues, No Age managed to make an already compelling movie seem epic. And for a group that seems open to anything, it was enough to hope that they decide to try this again.