Something we noticed just recently in our research of “Sin Nombre,” the incredible feature-film debut of director Cary Fukunaga.
Did you know that multi-culti indie-rocker Zach Condon of Beirut (he of the sometimes Eastern European oompapah mien) was set to compose his first score to the immigration drama cum human suffering tale?
Fukunaga, a fan of the Brooklyn-based songwriter approached Condon to compose the score, but after some failed attempts, including a trip to Mexcio, the collaboration fizzled out.
“I freaked. I couldn’t do it. I choked. Not only could I not create a world of sound for someone else’s vision, I also realized I would be incredibly unsatisfied if I did,” Condon said in an interview last year.
The two couldn’t get on the same artistic page, Condon told eMusic.
“I was supposed to record a soundtrack for a film, and [the director] was sending me reference material from all over Mexico. In the end, I think he wanted more of a string ensemble-type soundtrack, and I was getting really invested in this brass stuff I was hearing from Oaxaca, specifically. And I asked him if he would be interested in me going down there and using some of those musicians to play original compositions. And he basically said that wasn’t something he was interested in, and so I decided just to do it myself.”
And indeed he did, after being asked by the filmmaker to create the score, Condon travelled to Oaxaca, Mexico where he recorded with a 19-piece band from Teotitlán del Valle and those music sessions inspired Beirut’s new March of the Zapotec/Holland EP that came out in February of this year. “I had all this reference material, so I just applied it to whatever I was working on,” Condon told TimeOut.
Whether it’s related to Beirut’s bail out or not, Fukunaga told us very recently that “Sin Nombre”composer Marcelo Zarvos had a very short five weeks to quickly put the score together. Rushed or not, the score is rather amazing and is probably one of the more moving and noticeable ones of 2009 so far.
If you’ve seen “Sin Nombre” (which is one of our favorite films of the year so far) and witnessed it’s dramatic and sometimes incredibly brutal and realistic tones, you probably can’t imagine Beirut’s music in the film (we sure can’t). No disrespect to either of them, but Zarvos was the exact right musical choice.
However, is this the end of the Condon/Fukunaga music and film collaboration? Nope and here’s more on the story….