IT’S ALL IN MY MIND (CINEMA)
Much of my high school years were spent playing music on a live stage. That continued through the three years between Union County High and Ball State University. By the time I was ready for college, I was also ready for a new challenge. My attention had turned toward movie making, and I partly blame that on the late, great David Lynch. Blue Velvet and Wild At Heart (and Fire Walk With Me, even though I’d never watched the Twin Peaks TV series) shook up everything I knew about polite cinema. This sent me to the arty, independent section of Richmond’s Blockbuster Video looking for more of the strange and disturbing dream logic Lynch had delivered; I wanted to watch something confrontational and overtly surreal. But my girlfriend at the time took me to a fateful theater production at Richmond’s Earlham College, forever changing my life’s course—or at least creating a massive fork in the road—and it’s one I’ve been intersecting with again and again my entire adult life.
I was barely familiar with Cabaret, but I had a distaste for musicals in general. To my mind, they were the lowest common denominator/“feel good” option when it came to entertainment; I preferred my art to slap me around and leave me reeling. Well, let me tell ya: by the time the entire cast backed Sally Bowles down the catwalk bisecting the theater seats—a drum roll splitting the air like machine gun fire—and threw a collective Nazi salute as swastika flags dropped from every corner of the house, then BAP went the drum and out went the lights…I was definitely reeling. This visceral sensation stayed with me as I decided on a major at Ball State. Since the school only offered a minor in film (which I still chose), I became a theater major and hoped to write and direct something half as polarizing as Cabaret or Blue Velvet. And then came another surprise left hook.
I was still a musician, and a pretty damn good one, so I played in the miniature pit for the musical Working in my first semester and the following year became part of a semi-successful touring band called Krysco Kryngle (both the name and the whole endeavor are a story for another time). It seemed inevitable that I’d get involved in the near non-existent audio department at BSU, leading to my first job as sound designer for A Streetcar Named Desire. It seemed the best of all worlds, getting to wield music and sound effects to enhance the live experience of others without the massive weight one had to lift as a director. Post graduation and within a year of moving to Seattle, I became the resident sound designer and composer at The Empty Space Theater (RIP) as well as a budding freelance designer around town. This career eventually intersected with music made under my own name and I’ve explored the forking path between live music and live theater ever since. But how do we bring this full circle? Or maybe the overlapping circles of a Venn diagram are more appropriate.
Since I never consummated my cinematic ambitions over the years, it makes sense that I’d turn to moving pictures once more. It’s a small, good thing, creating music for miniature movies, and the Khonsu Samurai project has delivered an opportunity to do just that. Here’s a trailer for the Mind Cinema album featuring fake movie posters for made-up films based on my own song titles.
