This Halloween we have a great treat with SynthCleveland's Nosferatu, their live synthesizer score played with this classic vampire film by director F.W. Murnau. Cleveland is ripe for this progressive group and I was thrilled to see such a large crowd fill the space at Rain. Anyone who likes the thrill of live music and the storytelling power of great filmmaking will love live accompaniment of these classic silent movies. If you have never been to one, keep an eye out for them when they do come along, most often at the Cleveland Cinemateque, you won't be sorry. It is a great look back at the early days of movies, when the town would gather in the grange hall to watch the newsreels, cartoons, serials, and features - a lone organist/pianist filling the silence. The musicians (including notech, tofu and Luigi-Bob Drake) are all obviously very talented, passionate and creative, with a setup that would make any film acoustically exciting, however once the film started I had the growing sense that they were watching it for possibly the first time. (This was confirmed in an overheard conversation with one of the musicians, who said that they had purposefully NOT watched their videotapes so that they could improvise.) The result was a soundscape that only occasionally changed with the film, and most often was simply a creepy ambient mix which would have been a good background for a halloween party. When the score did draw attention to itself, it was generally because it did not match the emotions or the dramatic build of the scene. Soundtracks for silent films are notoriously difficult to create in an effective manner, even for the most skilled of musicians. It must be present without overshadowing, but also cannot disappear completely into the background. At times a great challenge is the condition of the print that the musicians are bound to, with all the edits, missing frames, and discolorations that make some films difficult even to watch. Nosferatu is famous for its stark imagery and there are at least ten recorded scores from the original composition/compilation by Hans Erdmann, and groups as diverse as the Silent Orchestra, and Type O Negative. The film itself is a classic, the first film adaptation (1922) of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, with enough changed to prevent the stoker estate from blocking production. You can google the film history lesson yourself, but this is a powerful silent film, very dark and dramatic, with stylized performances (German Expressionism), and creepy location settings replete with grotesque shadows. Even though the story is a bit hard to follow at times and the pace can be tedious, it is 82 years later it is still captivating enough to inspire horror film makers and musicians alike.

In 1991, the Warner Brothers Symphony made a huge success with Bugs Bunny on Broadway, music composed by the exacting hand of Carl Stalling and Milt Franklin, made to match the cartoons frame by frame, rife with musical references and lushly dramatic in their own right. Murnau's Nosferatu deserves the same careful treatment, a score that works with the onscreen images to fill the senses of the audience not a generalized background whose novelty wears off rather quickly. I look forward to more SynthCleveland filmscores, and hope they look to the examples of the Kronos Quartet and Blue Grassy Knoll, who carefully craft their music to the films they accompany. In a nutshell, the encore showing of Nosferatu by SynthCleveland is sure to be a perfect addition to your Halloween weekend. Check it out on Saturday, 10/30 at 9PM, at Orthodox Cleveland's Midnight Mixer at 6205 Detroit Ave.corner of West 64th and Detroit Avenue. Midnight Mixers are monthly multimedia events that bring together cutting edge artists and performers. The performers create live electronic music and realtime video. The venue is a unique 100 year old orthodox church located at West 64th and Detroit. Visit http://www.synthcleveland.com and http://www.midnightmixer.com From Cool Cleveland reader Larry Nehring (:divend:)