#boxhead ensemble

Boxhead Ensemble founder/leader Michael Krassner and filmmaker Braden King have sustained a partnership since the 1990s that has included live accompaniment for selected shorts and multiple soundtracks for the movie Dutch Harbor: Where The Sea Breaks It’s Back. Krassner’s approach to scoring capitalizes on the improvisational skills of musicians selected for their identifiable sounds and the potential chemistry of personnel combinations that may occur for the first time when the players plug in, sit down and start playing along with what’s on the screen. For Dutch Harbor, he assembled a line-up of mid-1990s Chicago rock and post-rock all-stars. When the movie hit the road, he took some of those musicians and a shifting array of new ones to make a new score every night. Not long after a Boxhead tour of Europe in the wake of the September 11th attacks, Krassner moved to Arizona, but he’s sustained ties to both Chicago and King. In the early 2000s, the Ensemble made a series of stand-alone records that blurred the lines between ambient and Americana.  

Most recently Krassner worked with King on Here, a road movie about a cartographer’s misadventures in Armenia. Between 2008 and 2011 they staged multi-media experiences that combined three screens showing footage shot for Here, holograms, and a live band. He also scored the finished movie, which circulated festivals in 2011. Not long before the movie was complete, Krassner came back to Chicago to try to channel a bit of that Dutch Harbor energy. He booked a couple days at Electrical Audio and convened a small group of players who have been associated with different phases of the Boxhead Ensemble. Jim White, who drums with the Dirty Three, was a mainstay of the late 1990s-early 2000s touring ensembles. Cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm returned from the non-filmic records made later in the 2000s. Guitarist Tim Rutili and fiddle/guitar player James Becker have not only come in and out of Boxhead since the late ‘90s, but have also retained Krassner as a producer for Califone’s Heron King Blues. More recent recruit Shahzad Ismaily is a multi-instrumentalist whose credits run the gamut from Laurie Anderson to the Renderers. Nothing from the session made it into the movie, but a double album sourced from the Electrical Audio sessions has been released just in time for the 20th anniversary of Dutch Harbor’s first screenings.

The MO for these sessions involved different combinations of musicians playing in response to scenes from the movie. As befits a film set mainly in mountain passes, near-desert expanses and crumbling buildings far older than the people who currently inhabit them, the music evinces grit and a potentially endless vibe that sustains even after the music fades to silence. Resonant cello, liquid bass and slowly feeding-back electric guitar negotiate a contrapuntal reverie on “Wednesday Trio No. 4;” a similarly named but differently configured trio recorded the next day uses heavily strummed guitar and pizzicato fiddle to evoke slow, trudging progress. Becker’s acoustic bowing bring to mind pre-electrification antiquity, while liberally pedal-processed electric guitars played by most parties acknowledge the plot point that Here’s protagonist is doing advance work for an eventual Google Maps-type documentation of Armenia. Rutili’s distinctive, chugging contributions recall his playing in Califone. They confer a temporally unmoored, Neil Young on the moon quality to certain tracks. As is his wont, Krassner plays frequently but understatedly, adding solidifying loops and linchpin flourishes that pull everything together.  

One wonders why this music didn’t make it to the finished film. Not the hints of Americana; the finished film still has a bit of that. It has a strong identity — if you’ve heard the Dutch Harbor soundtrack and the mid-2000s records, you’ll likely recognize the links between this music and that in short order. Most likely King already had enough good sound material and just put this stuff in the bank as insurance. It’s certainly strong enough to exist on its own.

Sounds like?

effect-laden modern classical

Moods

Cerebral

Thoughts

I can't tell if it's because I listened to this with ear buds or if it's recorded in a certain way but it felt very much 'in my head'. These tracks have space and build tension at times as well as create feelings of intimacy. Reminds me of an indie version of the Kronos quartet.

On second listen I was especially bored, just OK.

More Info

https://www.discogs.com/Boxhead-Ensemble-Quartets/release/198661

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