In a backyard shed, five musicians squeeze around a keyboard, drum set, electric guitar, bass, and trumpet. It’s a rehearsal for an upcoming show.
But this isn’t your typical rock gig.
Eugene band Minor Mirage is preparing to perform a live, original soundtrack to a silent film from 1928.
The film is The Wind, a drama set on the windswept plains for Texas. When Minor Mirage first took on the project last year, the band had to figure out how to turn a feature-length film into a piece of music, without losing the sound that makes them Minor Mirage.
“We’re a spaghetti Western band, so you have to have a trumpet, and you should have a steel guitar in there,” said Brandon Olszewski, who plays trumpet and pedal steel guitar.
The group’s sound blends Western tunes inspired by Ennio Morricone with psychedelic surf, exotica lounge music, along with some heavier rock influences.
At first, the band tried pairing songs they had already written with different scenes. But they soon started pulling melodies apart, reworking them in different keys and building themes around the film’s characters.
Keyboardist John Shields, who studied music composition and theory, took the lead on the score’s chords, harmonies, and overall structure. The rest of the band shaped the music, developing their own parts with instruments more commonly found in a modern rock band than an old movie theater.
“This is the most epic project that I’ve done thus far,” Shields said. “Actually playing it was harder than writing it, to be honest. This starts from zero seconds to about an hour and fifteen seconds with no stops. So you really have to know the movie.”
The Wind follows a young woman who moves to a remote part of west Texas, where she struggles with an unfamiliar landscape and the people around her. As the story grows darker, so does the music. The band shifts from melodies to dissonant unsettling sounds that mirror the main character’s psychological distress.
For guitarist Joe Davey, that’s part of what makes scoring a film different from writing a set of songs. The music has to follow the story, sometimes taking the audience somewhere uncomfortable.
“When you’re trying to write music for a scene or a person that’s just like ‘oh I don’t want to relate to this person at all,’ you draw on whatever music is expressive enough to be a little disturbing; it should put you off-kilter, it should not feel comfortable to listen to,” Davey said.
The band’s approach also gives the nearly century-old film a sound that feels distinctly modern. Bassist Steven Weeks thinks the music adds a different lens to the film, enhancing both their music and the movie.
“Our music is very very different from what would’ve happened 100 years ago during the showings of these silent films,” he said. “So, we’re watching this film and finding new emotional layers, and we can bring it out in a new musical language that’s sort of louder, more in your face, and with more effects.”
The band’s first performance of The Wind sold out last November, so they brought it back for another three sold out performances in February. That collaboration with the Eugene Art House has since earned Minor Mirage and the theater this year’s Arts and Business Partnership Award from the Arts and Business Alliance of Eugene.
Now, the band is expanding the project with a new score for an excerpt from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent film Strike, which will open the upcoming show before the showing of The Wind.
Minor Mirage performs live at the Eugene Art House Oct. 16 and 17.
