Inspired by Akira Ifukube's film scores, Kaijūscope is a collaborative experiment involving music and narrative panorama.
Kaijū (怪獣, translating to strange beast) is a Japanese term commonly associated with media involving giant monsters. Kaijūscope is a performance piece that I ideated and co-directed with musician/composer Jayn Pettingill who wrote original music for it. In the performance the original score is played live by eleven musicians while an animated narrative panorama is projected on a screen behind them.
Kaijūscope can be explained as a melting pot, both regarding music and visuals. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, a sonic beast has been fashioned from Akira Ifukube's film scores (best known for his work at famed Toho Studios and most notably for his Godzilla soundtrack work). Jayn combined, extended and developed melodic motifs and rhythmic gestures found in the scores and composed new material to join these musical ideas: these became launching points for a soloist or background textures to support the visual narrative unfolding before the audience. Important motivic statements are used to suggest a mood or as commentary, which are then explored via improvisation. Improvisation plays a key role not only in the music but also in developing and furthering a dialogue: Kaijūscope's mission is to develop and sustain a conversation about the interplay of music with visual language.
As for the projection, newly created images, found photographs, animated GIFs, video clips, miniatures... all served as visual tropes and all contributed to create a narrative with a life of its own, intended to be something different than a music video. While the scenery slowly reveals itself for it to evolve, in time, so does the music, by shifting and reshaping, as if in conversation with the panorama unfolding before the audience’s eyes.
Diagram used as a tool to organize the interplay between music and visuals.
The juxtaposition of image and thematic material provides a rich arena for an ensemble and a visual artist to play “off” of. How an improviser chooses to intersect with those things can create chaos or resolution; suspense or relief. Kaijūscope uses pre-established boundaries, through my imagery and Jayn's arrangements, to explore and test collaborative parameters in film and music.
Dress rehearsal in San Francisco before the premiere.
Being Kaijūscope such an explorative playground for its makers, it seemed coherent to think of our audience as active members of the exploration. Standing by the principle that curiosity is infectious, we relied on the assumption that audience member would feed from being surrounded by curious explorers (mainly the musicians, jamming live) to become explorers themselves, and so we decided early on in the ideation phase to let the audience's ears and eyes wander freely, with little to no guidance. The challenge of Kaijūscope consisted in crafting a tale which could be an inviting ground for anyone's interpretation, whether they decided to experience music with a descriptive visual content, or to experience visuals with a descriptive score.
Melodies have the power to evoke or summon strong feelings, moods or memories in an audience; through the visuals I decided to give the audience the power of choice. And to do that, I had to avoid traditional narrative techniques such as editing, dialogue, camera movements, because these are the tools that in the art of film are used to drag the viewer inside a predetermined narrative flow. So I went for the idea of a one-shot-narrative-panorama, animated, growing, evolving and cyclic. And since the panoramic landscape is populated by lots of different subjects, the viewer is drawn to choose what to watch, which of the many narratives to follow, engaged in a personal live-editing session between close-ups and wide shots that happens only in their mind.
Kaijūscope, both in its visual and musical components, is made of 5 phases or movements which, in the visual storyline, correspond to 5 stages of evolution of the landscape:
1. Wake up
It's dawn. Peace reigns. A morse code breaks the silence: the encrypted message is somehow alarming. Suddenly a mysterious presence is felt and heard (a deep sound of timpani is played). A giant footprint appears in the field while the sun rises. Who or what caused it is unknown: but all seems fine, so life goes on.
2. Equilibrium
After the initial mystery, Kaijūscope unveils an ostensible equilibrium during which the world is building up. The footprint is covered, forgotten.
3. Chaos
This is the phase in which everything begins to collapse: the world has reached its sustainable limit, while its inhabitants have lost any understanding of the environment they are part of. Here monsters (or rather their consequences) emerge again.
4. Resettling
The last inhabitants leave the world. Things vanish, the landscape reshapes.
5. Sleep
Dusk. The giant footprint is revealed once again. It was always there, though no memory of it survived. It will happen again. History is helpless.
Details of the panorama during Equilibrium and Chaos phases, with survivors leaving the planet.
The premiere of Kaijūscope took place at the Make Out Room in San Francisco on September 3, 2012, followed by a second performance at the Berkeley Arts Festival on September 5.
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CREDITS
Direction, Art Direction and Animation
Michele Graffieti
Composer
Jayn Pettingill
Musicians
Steve Adams (flute/saxophone), Michelle Alexander (keyboard/vocals), Vijay Anderson (drums), Chris Grady (trumpet), Lisa Mezzacappa (bass), Suki O' Kane (percussions), Matt Plummer (trombone), Jameson Swanagon (guitar), Carolyn Walter (low reeds), Cory Wright (reeds)
Producer
Nicole Coleman