These days, we burn through the anti-fame decrees of young “up-and-comers” almost as fast as the meager caloric intake of said “unintentionally” famous person. Sure, bud, you’re strictly putting yourself out there for the sanctity of artistic expression. You hate the attention. It’s just so shallow. And while it’s easy for us to be snarky about such declarations, it can be difficult with the predatory internet fondling your every move from afar. How does one stay relevant, and aurally sexy, though, without brash and/or charming public stunt-play? This column suggests it’s through diffusion of sound to visual story, and that a collaborator is perhaps more important than what that story might actually convey. It also suggests that for some, despite (or maybe because of) immense talent, the public eye is pointless and something to be shunned in earnest.
To better understand the special ingredients for decades-plus soundtrack work alongside studio releases—all with modestly managed fame and creative evolution—let’s look to someone who’s actually, uniquely, acutely, done so. Enter the forceful, yet elegantly reclined, whirring, orchestra-bleeding, dusky-lounge dream band Tindersticks. The group is currently afoot on an international tour, performing numbers they’ve scored over 15 years to four contemporary masterworks of celebrated French director Claire Denis. The tour celebrates a boxed set of these soundtracks. Stuart Staples, Tindersticks’ lead man, who has seen the band through eight record releases, takes the interview by phone from France, while on break from rebuilding his studio with a team of construction workers and engineers.
      When asked if there’s therapy in the studio rebuild, and similarly, with diverting musical output to film, Staples responds, “I think when you work in your own world, and then take yourself out of that world and give yourself up to somebody else’s vision, it’s like [therapy]. And that’s why I think working with Claire has changed us. You can look back through our history and feel these points of change that often revolve around working with Claire because it’s just a different viewpoint … It’s something that in its essence feels progressive. [With scoring Denis’ films], I never feel like I’m looking to the past. Working on White Material was like stepping into an unknown place because every one of the films has been so different. It keeps it moving.”
White Material is indeed a progressive fusion of image and sound. The film explores expansionism’s ideological scar tissue in post-colonial Africa—what happens when the order of things crumbles. On the crumbling tip, let’s take a pilgrimage to 1988, Soviet Russia, where another brilliant musician has cast his talent to filmic story. Contrary to the path of Tindersticks, however—and testament to the rarity of their concrete relationship with Denis—this moment in art vanishes like a flash in the dark. It goes like this: Russian film icon Aleksandr Sokurov premieres Days of Eclipse, a brilliant psycho-traumatic vision quest, scored by 23-year-old composer Yuri Khanon. The young composer is honored with a Felix from the European Film Awards for his soundtrack. Khanon accepts his award, becomes famous, performs with the likes of Erik Satie in top venues across Russia, gives interviews for television and print, and then abruptly declares he’ll no longer perform in public. As Vladimir Tikhonov, of The University of Oslo’s Institute for East European and Oriental Studies, stated regarding Khanon’s departure, “Metaphorically speaking, he stormed out and started a life of a recluse, thus having declared: ‘I’m done! You’d better think I exist no more!’ And we, his contemporaries, have nothing to respond.” Indeed.
      The spotlight’s a warm, sweet place to lay your head, though, and statements like Khanon’s typically dissolve into hypocrisy, punctuated by the buffoonery of reunion tours, special appearances, and in some cases: new name, same sound. Khanon, however—though he subsequently recorded and released music, much of which is still used in Russian ballets, allegedly without his permission—has held his ground, reportedly leading a relatively muted life of painting, philosophy, writing (1995’s 700-page novel/memoir Skryabin As a Face), and botany.
      What motivated Khanon’s public disappearance? The web contains varying rifts of speculation, most of which settles on an early aversion to formalism, notably with the classical instructors at the Leningrad Conservatory where he studied, and that Khanon often denounced the notion of being called an “artist” or “composer,” contending that you more or less couldn’t make your way down the street without stumbling over one of the similarly self-professed. Still, having only scored four films in as many years before his abrupt departure, might he have come to find lasting comfort in the process, comfort in the sort of invisibility musical dispersion into visual story allots, had he waited longer, or worked with directors more aligned with his worldview? It’s hard to imagine a more dynamic visionary with which to cohort than Sokurov, but perhaps the nuances of a crumbling U.S.S.R. leaked into their exchange, clouding things to a point of non-pleasure?
      Khanon, you see, is noted for his love of Erik Satie, and the Satie-inspired idea that a composer possesses ideological impulses which are carefully matriculated into music. It could be, then, that Khanon’s ideological impulses had reached a certain exactitude, or lack thereof, and scoring, or performing, was no longer a viable matriculation. But perhaps what’s to be inferred from Tindersticks’ output is that ideologies are secondary to whom it is you’re working with. “We’ve come close to working on other films,” Staples says, “but we’ve reached a point that this freedom in conversation is very special to Claire. Other people don’t have it and don’t work like that. As soon as somebody says, ‘We want something like this song, here.’—for myself and David [Tindersticks’ accordion and organ player], our minds turn off because it becomes like fulfilling a task. Claire would never do that. She gives us the script; she gives us some data. She wants to know how it makes us feel and when we feel music in the film, it’s the start of a conversation.”¬¬
      It’s silly to venture on what sort of open-ended conversation—like the particularly unique one mentioned above between Tindersticks and the untouchable Denis—might have needed to occur between Khanon and his collaborators to continue scoring visual quests and dramas, let alone performing. Perhaps what we’re truly intended to gather from the stunning sequences in Days of Eclipse, or a sit-down with his unusual “Five Smallest Orgasms” is that his creative conversation, be it with an audience or a director, is simply best left uninterrupted. After all, he’s not on hand for any sort of retort.