Superchunk are writing music to accompany A Page of Madness, a 1926 avant-garde Japanese silent film directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa. The band will play along to film at San Francisco's Castro Theater on April 23rd, as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival.
"It's a little bit more minimal than a lot of Superchunk stuff," says the band's frontman Mac McCaughan of the score. "It's a pretty dark movie. I don't think it's a good idea to make music that directly mirrors what's happening on the screen or anything, but it doesn't really lend itself to some of the more romantic upbeat things that are on Looking for Leonard [the 2001 soundtrack that McCaughan scored under the name of his side project Portastatic]. It all takes place in an insane asylum. We're trying to make music that sounds slightly insane."
With drummer Jon Wurster honoring a previous commitment to tour with Caitlin Cary, Chuck Johnson will join the band onstage with a laptop full of pre-recorded drum tracks and string parts. Known for hyper fare, Superchunk is taking an alternate songwriting tact for the score. "You have to get in the mindset where you're letting things develop over a longer period of time," McCaughan says. "If we wrote Superchunk-length songs, we'd have to write, like, twenty songs. "You definitely have to think more about the arrangements and the idea of having themes, and working with these themes a bunch of different ways, in different settings, different tempos and keys and stuff like that. You can't throw twenty songs at people and expect it to be coherent."
Superchunk recently released the limited-edition live acoustic disc Vol.1 Acoustic In-Stores East & West, the first "official bootleg" of what the band calls the Clambake Series. McCaughan got the idea for the releases after talking to members of Lambchop and Calexico, who issue similar tour recordings.
"I thought it was a cool idea, and then I thought about doing a series of live records that way," he says. "The first stuff I started listening to was recordings from the acoustic shows that we did and it seemed like a good way to start it because the stuff from the actual shows tends to be a little bit rougher. It's so loud and out of control dealing with live sound in that setting. But the acoustic stuff sounded pretty decent, and it's so different from the way people have heard these songs already."
Recorded on tour last fall, the eighteen-track compilation is named after the band's favored term for onstage flubs. "A clam is a mess-up," says McCaughan. "But that's an old term, I always thought it came from jazz terminology, like jazz guys talk about that, like if you're blowing clams, you're hitting wrong notes. We use it, but we certainly didn't invent it. We were on tour one time and our roadie found this cardboard box and he took a marker and wrote on the side of it 'Jim's box of clams' and set it on the side of the stage so everyone could see it. He'd break that out when someone was having a bad night."
COLIN DEVENISH
(April 4, 2002)