There have been plenty of unusual gigs over the years — bands have played on the back of trucks, on buses, on an oil rig — but has any group ever played an original set of music to a movie about bears? That’s exactly what Los Angeles duo No Age did last week in Seattle.
“It’s an idea we’ve been talking about for a while,” says Dean Allen Spunt, the band’s drummer and singer. “It’s a movie that Randy (Randall, the band’s guitarist) really liked when he was a kid.”
The noise-pop group performed a 90-minute set of music specifically created for The Bear, an ’80s French film shot in British Columbia that follows two bears as they develop a friendship and escape from hunters. It sounds like a wacky, and challenging, project, but Spunt says it wasn’t as difficult to pull together as he thought it would be.
“We just watched the movie and felt out the emotions,” he explains. “It’s mainly animals, so it was easy to pull samples and tones. We have little titles for certain areas in the movie, like ‘Morning Time’ is a specific tone.”
No Age performed the live soundtrack at the Seattle International Film Festival, so unless the band gets invited to play at TIFF, it’s unlikely they will bring the Bear show to their North by Northeast gig Friday night.
What people can expect is a set filled with the infectious sonic blasts and grunge-like melodies found on their sophomore record Nouns. Spunt says the twosome might also play some tunes off their forthcoming EP, which they just recently finished recording.
The four-song disc, which will be out in September or October, will be more sample heavy than their last record Spunt reveals.
“We’ve always done samples, but it’s a little more present now,” he says. “I figured out a way to make them sound better. We write more with them rather than use samples to augment our songs.
“We’ve tried to expand things and maybe go in different areas that we wouldn’t go in,” Spunt adds. “It seems to me it sounds nicely saturated. I feel it’s like a really nice painting.”
Some fans will likely be disappointed that the group isn’t releasing a full-length, but Spunt says the band has always been interested in “quick segments.”
“I think concentrating on a full record is a lot of work,” he says. “Sometimes you just need to get something out, something smaller. An EP with four or five songs is a good thing to have. Some of my favourite records are EPs.”
Whether or not the band will whip off all their new tunes during Friday night’s show remains to be seen, but if you’re lucky you “may or may not” be able to catch some of the tracks the night before.
“We’re playing a secret show,” he says, “but we’re not sure how secret it is because NXNE set it up.”
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• For details on events and showtimes at North By Northeast visit www.nxnx.com.
