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November 12 & 13
On the occasion of Will Oldham’s visit to Anthology to present KEEPING SECRETS WILL DESTROY YOU, the “visual album” created to accompany his new album, we’ll be screening a brief selection of films for which Oldham has contributed soundtracks over the years.
Will Oldham has been avowedly intentional about contributing only original, unreleased music to films and television. “I’ve never been into the idea of taking a song that belongs in one place and putting it into a totally different context,” as he told Alan Licht in 2012’s “Will Oldham on Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy”, the life- and career-spanning book-length interview modeled on the famous Faber and Faber series typically dedicated to filmmakers. “Music should be made for movies.” As a complement to KEEPING SECRETS WILL DESTROY YOU, we present three rarely screened films scored entirely by Oldham, all of which were released as albums by his longtime label, Drag City.
ODE MUSIC and SEAFARERS MUSIC (the latter produced in response to filmmaker Jason Massot’s request to use ODE MUSIC as the soundtrack) consist of instrumental or “silent music”, a term Oldham derived from descriptions of Arabic classical music by way of Egyptian singer and actress Oum Kalsoum. Sonically akin, these two EPs use looped guitars and layers of keyboards and organs to create motifs that range in tone from mournful to euphoric.
BLACK/RICH MUSIC, named for THIS BLACK RICH EARTH, the initial title of THE BROKEN GIANT, uses lyrical, sung pieces along with instrumental variations. “The Risen Lord”, the de facto main theme of THE BROKEN GIANT, uses a D.H. Lawrence poem for lyrics, narrating the “strife of desires” that echo throughout the film, while songs such as “Do What You Will Do” and “Allowance” epitomize the bawdy, plaintive brilliance of Oldham’s writing and voice in the exploratory period between the Palace era(s) and the introduction/coronation of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy.