Marc Houle Curates a Soundtrack for the Madness

As the industry swarmed toward the Netherlands for the Amsterdam Dance Event conference this past week, techno trouper Marc Houle premiered a different kind of musical project. A key figure in the minimal movement over the past decade, and one of the key artists on Richie Hawtin’s Minus label before he struck out with Magda to fire up his own Items & Things label, Houle’s knack for experimenting led him in a completely unexpected direction. Mainly, composing the soundtrack for a renowned 1920s silent Japanese horror film.

“It’s a funny thing, because I had never actually heard of this film before,” Houle says of A Page of Madness, the film that Japanese director Kurutta Ippeiji had famously thought was lost forever—until he rediscovered it by chance in the 1970s.

“It’s one of those things where I’d just stumbled upon it randomly myself while adventuring through the internet, bouncing from link to link,” recalls House. “What happened with the film was, the director had thought the prints of the film had been lost forever during the war. And then one day during the ‘70s, he was poking around in his back shed, and in the bottom of the box, he found this reel. He opened it up, and lo and behold, it’s the film. He said, ‘Holy shit! Oh my god, I can’t believe it survived.’”

Ippeiji added a jazz soundtrack to the film, and since then, it has earned cult status as a masterpiece of Japanese silent cinema that uses a striking array of creepy, unsettling imagery to convey the inner thoughts and feelings of patients in a mental hospital. However, upon first watching, Houle found something a little off about the soundtrack.

“The jazz music just doesn’t really go with this whole brooding, scary emotional movie,” he says. “It’s a film about madness, so I could see why it had all these crazy, improvised jazz flourishes—because music-wise, that’s about as close to madness as you can get. And I thought to myself, this would be so cool with a really dark soundtrack on it. So, that’s why I decided to do it, just for me for fun, as like an exercise. Because I always enjoy doing little projects and stuff like that.”

Amazingly, Houle composed his first rough placement of the soundtrack in a single evening of staying up all night in his studio, before being inspired over the next six months to return to it again and again, before it was something worth showing.

“It began when I was sitting in the studio, making weird music just after watching the movie. I stayed up all night and had a rough version by the morning. Doing it all in one sitting works really well because the instruments you choose are the same, the feeling is the same, it’s a consistent vision. Then I perfected it over the next six months.”

Houle’s creation is a riveting soundtrack indeed—a smoothly curated wave of moody electronica that ebbs and flows in unison with the emotional movements of the film. Beginning with an unsettling drone, it builds into thudding beats as the madness is unleashed on the screen, matching the film’s emotional beats as it moves through its plot over the hour.

“After I’d begun the process, I thought, this is actually really cool. It changed my feelings toward the film. There wasn’t too much about it on the net—only a couple of brief plots and stuff like that. So I had to figure it out myself. ‘Who’s this… Who’s that.’ Once I watched it and got familiar with the characters, I began to understood it more—‘Oh, he’s looking at her like that… That’s the same girl as before.’ So I kind of began to build a story for it.”

This opened the door for Houle to offer his own interpretation of A Page of Madness with his soundtrack, with the silent format of the film opening up the possibilities. However, he asserts that he was working with a very steady and realized piece of work.

“There’s a definite plot and structure to it; it’s not like some weird kind of surreal movie or something. If I guide people a little bit, they appreciate it much more… I started showing it to my friends, and they were like, ‘Wow, this is really cool.’ Some were even saying it was one of the best things I’d ever done. And I’m like, ‘Really? Okay.’ And that’s when I thought that maybe it was something that was worth showing to the public.”

Houle performed his soundtrack for A Page of Madness live in Amsterdam this past week, consistent with his status as a live performer instead of a DJ. It’s an approach he says is more natural for him than just sitting and watching it on the screen (“That would just be weird,” he laughs). It’s a successful experiment that joins a lot of the other more conventional projects Houle has worked on this year. His touring schedule included gigs at Richie Hawtin’s mighty ENTER. residency in Ibiza, which saw him going back-to-back with Matador, and he says he’ll be exploring new approaches with releases on his Items & Things label later this year. He also celebrated the 10th anniversary of his debut Restore album by rereleasing it on Minus with remixes from a cast of techno luminaries like M.A.N.D.Y., Monoloc and Joris Voorn.

The question that comes to mind is whether his soundtrack for A Page of Madness was the result of Houle looking for a new direction, after a decade working as an established techno artist. He’d worked with a huge record label with Hawtin and his Minus outfit, established his own boutique label, and released a whole bunch of seminal techno records, plus an impressive number of artist albums. Was he searching for new creative dimensions?

“Nah,” Houle says without thinking too hard about it. “There was no big picture to it. I just love doing experiments. I love trying out new software, new hardware, that sort of thing. I know that some artists are always seeking that. Someone like Richie Hawtin, for instance, he likes to take on new challenges and explore new things. I’m not so much doing it for that. I’m not an explorer; I’m more of an experimenter—a mad scientist who’s happy with the materials in his lab.”

Follow Marc Houle on Facebook | Twitter

Share

Tags