Benjie Messer

The At Best Derivative soundtrack CD is back from the factory! It includes 36 tracks and almost an hour of music. Mark Nokes plays lead guitar, Eliot Ventimiglia plays saxophone, and I do all the rest with a computer and some magic beans. There’s retro-rock, chill-out jazz, tango, orchestral, surf-spy, kung-fu-style asian battle music, a let’s-get-it-on funk tune, even a track with me singing in three parts like the Eagles, if the Eagles all had an identical slight lisp. Excerpts are in the gray flash player on the left.

Soundtrack CDs, DVDs of the movie, and other ABD-related paraphernalia will be on sale here sooner or later, but for now, you can send me $10 through PayPal (benjiemesser at gmail.com), or email me for my postal address and then mail me a check for $10. Either way I’ll send your CD via Pony Express.

Just released- a complete scene from At Best Derivative:

Do you have your tickets yet?

I made a short film last weekend as part of the Almost Famous Film Festival 48-hr challenge. Our PIFMG team already had a composer- Bogdan Rygalski- so I signed on as boom boy (which meant I held the microphone), and I ended up helping out with the lighting too (I guess that means I was an “assistant grip”?) It was the first time I’d been on a movie set, and I learned a ton. It was interesting and boring and fun and hard work all at once. I guess only the top twenty teams even get their films screened, so I don’t know if ours will make it or not. It’s a goofy 5-minute middle-class-economic-fear comedy about a guy who can’t pay his mortgage and ends up in a sort of alternate horror universe of the poor.

Anyway, if you want to come see it- don’t! Come see At Best Derivative on March 6 instead. I’m sure this one will be posted on YouTube in a week or so, and I’ll put it up here for all to see.

The streaming flash players I had installed on the left suddenly got really buggy, so I had to remove them. If you’ve come here looking for samples of my music (hi, 48-hr folks!), check out my the tracks on my myspace page for now. Hopefully they’ll be back here shortly.

Now that I’ve done a film score, and am thinking of doing some more, I’m trying to become a more organized fan of film composers. Anyway, in my first step of getting more organized, here’s a list of my favorite film scores- which is really a list of my favorite movies in which I’ve been really struck by how the music gives life to the movie:

Mirrormask- This is probably my favorite film score to date. It’s by a British saxophonist named Iain Ballamy. The music has a hundred colors, and it’s largely played by six guys, who also appear in the movie as an integral part of the plot. It’s a fantasy film, and the way the music changes to transport the viewer from the real world to the fantasy world is just awesome.

Brazil- Probably my favorite movie ever, and not least because Michael Kamen’s score makes me laugh out loud. Tremendously creative use of a single song.

Brick- This movie came out in 2008, and I’m totally cheering for and following this brilliant young director Rian Johnson, and his brother Nathan Johnson, who did the music. Nathan runs a band in Boston called the Cinematic Underground that performs on homemade instruments- it sounds like an indie punk vaudeville thing, I can’t quite tell- and his score for Brick is both perfect and very unconventional- very spare and eerie, lots of weird sounds. They have a new movie coming out this summer, The Brothers Bloom, that I’m looking forward to.

Batman- This is probably my favorite “big fat superhero” score. It was Danny Elfman’s first “big fat big-budget hero” movie- he’d mostly done goofy movies up to this point: Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Edward Scissorhands, etc.- and I think he really created a new masterpiece in the genre. Of course since then he’s done a ton of these- I also love his recent score for Ang Lee’s Hulk, but then I sort of identify with the main character, so…

Twin Peaks- I know- it was a TV show- but Angelo Badalamenti’s music is SO iconic and mysterious that it makes the list.

Hero- How many modern classical composers can you recognize from a few notes? I love Tan Dun for that reason- he’s got such a personal style. His score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a huge hit, and I think this one is just as great- it just wasn’t as well received because the movie was too philosophical for most martial arts fans. Itzhak Perlman is the featured violin soloist.

The Matrix- Don Davis did a brilliant job with this. I’ve watched a bunch of these fight scenes on YouTube recently, and the music and sfx are brilliant at uniting and pacing these scenes, and making them look cool. It’s no accident everybody wants to sound like the Matrix now.

Star Wars- Kids today grow up knowing John Williams’ score for Jurassic Park, but for me, it’s still all about the Star Wars movies. I just love his orchestral writing- it’s so emotional. Sure it’s cliche if you’ve seen it a hundred times- but you wouldn’t see it a hundred times if it wasn’t good. And as long as we’re on John Williams, his score to the first Indiana Jones movie was pretty iconic as well.

Hmm… what else…

James Horner is a composer I want to listen to more. I remember being very moved by the music to Glory when I saw it as a kid- picking it out on the piano afterwards and reliving the movie. And he also wrote the music to Sneakers, one of my most-times-watched movies, which features saxophonist Branford Marsalis in a sort of cool-jazz chill-out vibe.

Probably my oldest favorite movie is Spartacus (which isn’t even that old, I guess- it’s from 1960). I used to see it on TV all the time, and Alex North’s music is awesome. His “Love Theme from Spartacus” has been recorded as a ballad by lots of jazz musicians, but I think North’s original scoring is still the best version.

Okay- I’m pretty much done with my work on At Best Derivative!!!!! I celebrated a few weeks ago, when I finished all the writing, but then I had another week or two of mixing and dubbing. I can’t believe how hard I worked at it, and I’m very proud of the score, and excited to show people the movie. The sound guy has another day or two of post-production work, and then it’s being sent off to be duplicated.

I’m always carrying paper tickets to the premiere with me, to sell to anyone who wants to come, so those of you who are local, hit me up- they’re $11. The premiere, as I wrote below, is at 7:00 PM, Friday March 6, at the Tempe Center for the Arts. See you there?

Some people were looking for Hail to the Chief on Productiontrax recently- I think to use in videos about the inauguration- and we didn’t really have anything good, so I made this quick marching band version. My little contribution to the big O

I haven’t been posting much lately because I’ve just been working non-stop on the score for At Best Derivative, and not doing much else. ABD is a feature farce comedy, a self-conscious homage to spoofs such as the Naked Gun and Hot Shots, locally cast and produced on a micro budget. I’m very proud of the music I’ve written, and I have a lot left to write! (This pic on the right is from a scene I just finished.)

Anyway, the first (and so far, only) screening will be on Friday, March 6, at 7:00 PM, in the main theater of the Tempe Center for the Arts. Advanced tickets are available as of today, and can be bought online at the Friar’s Lantern website for $11 (with PayPal) or at theTCA website for $13 (or $18 on the day of the show.) Get ‘em while they’re hot.

Parents, FYI: At Best Derivative contains ridiculously excessive swearing, probably too much to overlook, enough that your kids will ask, “Why are you letting me watch this?”

First, my friend Toby’s band Kayodot just played Phoenix on their current US tour, and it was great to see him, Mia, my good buddy Terran, and the rest of the band. They sound better than ever, and if they’re coming to your city (their schedule is on their myspace page), I urge you to consider going to their show (and bringing earplugs). You’ll be supporting some true artists in the nearly impossible dream of performing music that no one expects to hear.

I don’t know how to describe their music at all anymore, and certainly not without stringing a lot of words together. “Metal chamber music dreamscapes” is the best I’ve come up with so far. I was astounded by the show they played here.

Second, I’ve been listening to my good friend Michael Daves’ solo record for a SOLID MONTH on my commute- I’ve probably heard it fifty times now- and let me tell you, this man is a legend in his own youth. I’m serious. His singing on this record took me a few listens to get used to- it’s very evocative, but hard to understand the words at first- but once I’d heard it a few times, I couldn’t imagine it sounding any other way. He makes the old time/bluegrass tradition sound new all over again, in our time, and it’s beautiful.

We’ve finished the trailer for At Best Derivative. The music I wrote for it ended up being mixed fairly low, so turn the volume up if you want to hear it.

And here’s the audio track in its full glory (not that it means much without the video):

Be patient- there are a few seconds of silence at the beginning.