Valerie Project / S/t

Drag City

“JOSEPH GERVASI and I had been talking about doing a synergistic film/music project for some time, and both of us brought up VALERIE. It so happened that Joseph owned a 16mm print of the film. I was blown away by its dreamlike imagery, old-world purity, psychedelic candor and mesmerizing soundtrack.” GREG WEEKS (of ESPERS) is describing the genesis of a new musical project entitled THE VALERIE PROJECT. Inspired by a classic of Czech New Wave cinema, JAROMIR JIRES’ Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders (1970), Greg, joined by members of Espers and other Philadelphia groups FERN KNIGHT, GRASS, FURSAXA, TIMESBOLD, WOODROSE, and RAKE (as enigmatic electronicist CHARLES COHEN), conceived a new soundtrack the film. Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders is allegorical coming of age work populated by bewitched earrings, weasels, vampires, frisky maidens, friskier huntsmen, wicked aunts, bespectacled eagles and the handsomest mustache this side of 1970, the year the film debuted. Key to The Valerie Project’s conception is how reframing the film’s with an alternate soundtrack draws new interpretations from a work depth and changeable meaning. LUBOS FISER’s original score is lovingly recalled and ambitiously targeted by the group as a sound cycle to equaled every time they play it. The tone is dense and ornate, expansively acid-charged — “a symphonic version of Magma” at its zenith.

• SHARE

  •  Twitter
  •  Stumbleupon
  •  Digg
  •  del.icio.us
  •  Facebook
  •  Mixx