Josh and Yvonne Lambert and Toto Miranda are The Octopus Project (photo by Chris Bilheimer)
As merry pranksters in the great northwestern wilderness, or whatever genre they might choose to unhinge, there’s a great, unplugged energy between the ironic tentacles of the Austin band-turned-composers The Octopus Project and filmmaking brothers David and Nathan Zellner. First collaborating on the shorts “Aftermath on Meadowlark Lane” and “Flotsam / Jetsam” before mutually making their feature debuts with the antics of “Kid-Thing,” the Octopus’ alt. rock voice found the blackly humorous fate in the sort of true story of a “Fargo” megafan’s fixation gone wrong in “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter,” and then brought oddball, unplugged authenticity to the western trope of a “Damsel” in distress who doesn’t need rescuing.
Now, the band that forged their sound in the wilds of Texas’ most offbeat city venture with the Zellners to find the still shambling dawn of man with “Sasquatch Sunset.” Played by the furrily unrecognizable, very game troop of Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Christophe Zajac-Denek and writer / co-director Nathan, they’re mostly soulful forest people with a penchant for “Porky’s”-style peepee, poo-poo and doggie style antics in their frequently uproarious misadventures. But leave it to the scoring, and the Zellners to begin to poignantly pull the wooly rug over the hipster audiences’ eyes of the movie they came to laugh with, only to discover they might be shedding a tear by the haunting end.
(Photo by Chris Bilheimer)
Comprised of Josh and Yvonne Lambert and Toto Miranda, the group has released six albums, hit Coachella and Lollapalooza and brought their whimsical brand to videogames and art installations. They’re part of a wave of alt. artists making notable inroads to finding a new sound in film scoring, which makes the retro folky feel of “Sasquatch Sunset” all the more beguiling. Cat Stevens guitar vibes dance about the sasquatch’s kinship with cute forest creatures even as squelched brass hits a ‘shroom trip gone very wrong. Straight outta 70’s synths evoke an old school weird nature doc, while the sampling of tree slugs and leaves add to the bucolic, flute and acoustic theme feel when the score isn’t going primally insane. Even more challenging is musically evoking the feelings of grunted language and pained looks of an increasingly hardscrabble existence as the creepily percussive specter of far more ominous walking ape descendants appear in their existences. It’s literally wildly creative work that’s in on the ape suit joke as well as the elegiac poetry that gradually slips in to make “Sasquatch Sunset” into one of the year’s more beguilingly eccentric movies and scores, all as The Octopus Project brilliantly evolve from the Austin Sea to mammalian bigfeet.
How did you come together, and develop your sound as a band? Would you say there’s something specifically “Austin” about your approach?
The three of us, Yvonne, Toto & I, had been in indie rock bands together in the late 90’s, but felt constricted by the standard guitar/bass/drums setup and wanted to do something more experimental that incorporated electronics (which we knew nothing about at the time), so we started The Octopus Project in 1999. It was always about experimentation and trying something new. Back then, and now, Austin had such a supportive music scene. I’d say we have an “Austin” approach in that we felt free to try out new musical ideas and we knew we’d be completely supported by our peers/the city at large. It’s such an inviting city and folks are just open to trying new things. That’s a very powerful and liberating feeling.
David and Nathan Zellner
How did you meet the Zellners, and was it a challenge to adapt your instrumental style and way of collaborating as bandmembers to becoming film composers with “Kid-Thing” and “Kumiko the Treasure Hunter?”
We met the Zellners in the early 2000’s through mutual friends, and we quickly became buddies and started working on each other’s projects. They’d direct music videos for us and we’d write music for their short films. It was in no way challenging to adapt our musical or writing style to work with them. We’re always up for trying new things and pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone. Plus, the Zellners are just a dream to work with! It’s almost as if they become part of our band when we’re working on a project together. As a band, we generally each work on music alone, then share it with rest of the group for thoughts/additions. Little by little, songs get built up by us each adding our ideas to the mix until it feels finished. This is exactly how we work with the Zellners as well. Many times, we’ll give them a finished piece, but sometimes we’ll give them ideas or even just sounds that they’ll edit to picture and we’ll go back in and craft something around that. It’s a very organic process. The edit informs the music, which in turn informs the edit, etc.
I discovered you and the Zellners with the delightful anti-western “Damsel.” How did you want your music to subvert the genre and the expectations of a damsel in distress, while at the same time authentically playing into it?
We try to stay authentic to where the characters are taking us. With “Damsel,” we knew we wanted something that could feel of that world – so, mostly acoustic/period-specific instruments (banjo, musical saw, wine glasses, flutes, etc.). And we knew it had to feel like a western, but also feel foreign, so we spent a long time crafting/editing the music to get it into that shape. In a sense, it was an exercise to see what our band would sound like if we had been around in the nineteenth century instead of now.
What did the Zellners want your music to evoke for “Sasquatch Sunset?”
The phrase that the Zellners used a lot was “Epic and Mysterious.” Despite zero dialogue, there are a lot of emotional beats that happen in the film, so we had to cover a ton of ground. But it generally fell into either the “Epic” or “Mysterious” category. Like “Damsel,” they also wanted the music to feel of the Sasquatch world, so we mostly used real instruments instead of synths/plugins. At least, things started as something that we physically played… We sampled ourselves a ton (violins, voices, horns, flutes, percussion), then played them back at various speeds & pitches. Sasquatches are big and slow, so pitching things way down felt like it fit into their world. Drums feel human in general, but when you change the pitch/speed, they can feel like some prehistoric creature is playing them.
Tell us about your “field recordings,” and how you made the sampling musical?
We traveled up to the shooting locations in Humboldt County during pre-production and recorded a ton of ambient sounds/plant and animal biodata. The ambient sounds that we used mostly ended up being percussive – banging a large branch on a wooden bridge, for example. We gathered the plant and animal biodata by using a box (called a MIDI Biosonification Device) with one cable that touches something living (ferns, redwoods, banana slugs) and another cable that sends the data to the computer. We took that MIDI data & used it to control samples (voices, string recordings, etc.), which ended up being some of the more ambient stuff in the film. We also prevalently used a field recording that Toto made on a trip to Peru of some ceramic coffee mugs clanging together on a rack. We slowed them way down and they sound almost intentionally percussive.
In its way, your score for “Sasquatch” is as ironic as “Damsel” in subverting the bigfoot movie genre. Yet there’s definitely a “western” sound to this as well. What’s the trick to finding the humor without becoming a “comedy” score, as the sight of the actors doing their “dawn of man” approach is funny enough itself?
It’s mostly just sticking with supporting the characters emotional journey. I know the film has comedic elements, but we never wanted to telescope them or beat the audience over the head with music that says, “THIS IS FUNNY!!” The “dawn of man” scene is pretty hilarious to us, but totally intense and fucked up for the Sasquatches, so we had to make the music intense and fucked up as well!
Given that the dialogue here are grunts, and emotions are expressed through the sasquatch suits, did that make the score even more important in terms of getting inside of these characters intelligent – if still animalistic – heads in a way that told the story?
Absolutely. It was always about respecting what they needed to say emotionally.
Riley Keough
Who was your favorite sasquatch to play, and why
They were all fun! Nathan’s character is kind of this alcoholic dad, so his themes were pitched/slowed percussion and trumpet stabs. Christophe’s character (the child) has this quasi-psychic quality, so his cues were more mysterious and playful. Jesse’s character is going through some big life changes, so his music was a little more epic and psychedelic. But maybe my personal favorite was writing for Riley. She’s strong and just trying to keep everything together, but also a little sad, so her scoring is some of the most emotional music in the film.
I really enjoyed your use of prog-rock retro synths, which gives the film the feeling of an old 1970’s nature documentary, like the kind of bigfoot film Sunn Classic Pictures had put out back then. Was that intentional?
Thanks! That was 100% intentional. “70’s nature documentary” was one of the prompts the Zellners gave us before they even shot the film. We initially wrote a bunch of stuff with just acoustic guitars & flutes, but that quickly turned into the more epic, psychedelic organ music once we started seeing footage. We all (OP’s and Zellners) love proggy 70’s stuff – from Popol Vuh to Terry Riley – so we tried to incorporate a lot of that into the score.
Nathan Zellner
There’s a trumpet motif you use as a sort of “danger” sound. How did you come up with that idea?
David Zellner said he wanted something like “Bitches Brew”-era Miles Davis for the Alpha’s freakout scenes. None of us are even remotely close to having Miles Davis’ chops, but we absolutely adore him and his 70’s work in particular. I played trumpet in my middle school band, so I did my best. It’s a little wonky and we even hired a professional trumpet player to try some stuff out, but the amateur/wobbly playing ended up making more sense for the film. It felt more in line with the characters. Plus, delay and reverb go a long way!
Tell us about the tunes on the “Sasquatch” soundtrack, whether they’re sung or grunted.
Riley graciously lent us her wonderful voice for the end credits song, “The Creatures of Nature.” Long before they started shooting, David Zellner gave us the lyrics and talk-singing vocal idea, along with the direction to create something haunting like the song, “Come Wander with Me,” which was in a 60’s Twilight Zone episode. This was actually the first thing we wrote for the film. When they recorded Riley’s vocals, they also did some pickup ADR grunts and sent us a file with everything. I thought it would be funny to edit a version of the song that was only grunts. I sent it to David (he loved it!) and he immediately sent it to Riley (she also loved it!), so we decided to release it on the soundtrack as well.
How did you want to convey the constant sense of discovery the sasquatches are having, particular when it comes to expressionistically finding the vestiges of man?
To the Sasquatches, those vestiges of man are completely blowing their minds. It’s all new, scary and foreign, and they don’t quite know how to handle it. We had to make the music convey what they are feeling in those moments, so it almost becomes a horror score at that point. The cognitive dissonance they are feeling onscreen is represented in actual dissonance/ominous vibes in the music. We recorded a bunch of takes of Yvonne playing crystal bowls, dropped it way down and layered various pitches on top of each other to create that low, warbling dissonance. There’s an inevitable scraping on the rim of the bowls as they are played, which added a creepy tension. Gyorgy Ligeti was a huge inspiration for those sequences.
Things definitely take a decidedly less funny change of tone for the sasquatch’s fates, particularly in one inexorable log sequence. How did you want to play the film’s darker turn?
The log sequence was so much fun to work on. We wanted something that could start off small, just a whisper at first and slowly build with an almost relentless and unyielding sense of doom. We took a sample of a saxophone that we’d recorded, pitched it down a couple of octaves, played it back at an incredibly slow BPM (50), then slowly opened up the filter as the tension increases. It feels like a giant, immovable force that’s slowly coming for you and you can’t do anything about it. You don’t realize it until it’s too late.
Jesse Eisenberg
At the end, the “Sunset” of the title is really an elegiac eco-metaphor for the inevitable fate of the sasquatch and the natural world as a whole. How did you want the score to set up the unexpectedly poignant message?
One of my absolute favorite aspects of Zellner films is that they start out as one thing and slowly become a different film entirely. They lure you in with humor, but you end up feeling a deep emotional connection with the characters by the end. Musically, we also wanted to follow that path. The score starts off in more of a light/mysterious tone and slowly grows more serious/poignant as it progresses. It gets heavier both emotionally and in the composition until the final piece of music just before the last scene, which contains elements from all of the cues before it.
Tell us about your upcoming documentary score about “Reading Rainbow?
“Butterfly In the Sky” was an absolute dream to work on! We all grew up watching “Reading Rainbow” and in part, our obsession with sounds and textures in music can be pinpointed directly back to that synth intro in the theme song. When we got the call to work on the film, we jumped at the chance to live in that 70’s PBS synth world. Stylistically, it’s the polar opposite from “Sasquatch” – lots of beeps and boops – but we approached it in the same way, creating a sound world that’s both referential to the world of the film, but also new and unique in its own right. We were also lucky enough to get Wayne and Steven from The Flaming Lips to sing our cover of the theme song. We couldn’t think of anyone better to convey the sense of childlike wonder that the song and original show embodied.
Why do you think you’ve been a good fit for the Zellners’ cinematic sensibility, especially when it comes to their highly ironic sense of humor and fate?
Simply, we just get each other. Their vision is always crystal clear, and our aesthetics so in tune with each other, that it’s almost just a formality of getting the music out into the world. It writes itself. Plus, we always approach their films with complete reverence. We might be scoring to a scene with a bunch of Sasquatches shitting on a road, but we never want it to be winky or self-aware. It always has to respect the characters and their particular emotional journey.
(Photo by Chris Bilheimer)
After this, do you believe in the bigfeet? And what would you do if you ever encountered one?
Thankfully, after working on this film, we’ve successfully gained the knowledge to communicate with a bigfoot in their natural language and through their customs. I feel confident that in the event of us encountering a bigfoot in the wild, we could finally bridge that divide that has separated humans and bigfeet for millennia.
See “Sasquatch Sunset” in theaters, with The Octopus Project’s soundtrack on Milan Records HERE
Special thanks to Sarah Roche at White Bear PR
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