Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
Logo of The Middlebury Campus
Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Dean and Britta

Call it a most beautiful marriage of music and film.

Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips — two musicians currently performing with a band under the moniker Dean & Britta — were commissioned several years ago by the Andy Warhol Museum and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust to compose music accompanying a handful of Warhol’s several hundred “screen tests” — short, silent film portraits of individuals both famous and completely anonymous. The result is titled 13 Most Beautiful: 13 songs written for 13 of, ostensibly, the most beautiful or most powerful screen tests. Wareham, Phillips and two other band members performed these songs in the McCullough Social Space on Saturday night with the respective film portraits projected on a large screen behind them.

Warham and Phillips certainly come from respectable musical backgrounds; Wareham was a founding member of the pioneering indie “dream-pop” band Galaxie 500, active from 1987 through 1991, and both were members of a subsequent band, Luna, which released a string of critically respected albums in the 90s and into the new millennium. Perhaps the contemporary fanbase for these bands has lapsed (despite their influence on bands as wide-ranging as Yo La Tengo, Beach House, Sigur Rós and My Bloody Valentine) — certainly some factor prevented the show in McCullough from drawing much of a crowd. Chalk it up to this being the first weekend back, for MCAB not having much time to promote the event, or to the fact that it was hard to succinctly advertise due to its complex, multimedia nature; regardless, the Social Space was mysteriously empty for this haunting and captivating performance.

dean-and-britta-225x300


The sound mix was loud but crystal clear, the musicians had a subtle, expert touch and Warhol’s film portraits are entrancing. When they were shot (and there’s approximately 500 of them), the subjects were posed, lit and then shot with a 16mm camera on 100-foot reels of silent, black and white film. A few of the portraits were slowed down just slightly in order to match the four-minute length of the others, and this gave some of them an especially ghostly aura. The screen tests may not be the best known facet of Warhol’s oeuvre, but they have been exhibited previously (in shifting compilations with names like 13 Most Beautiful Boys and 13 Most Beautiful Women), and perhaps most notably in “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” the traveling multimedia “happening” in which Warhol’s video art was accompanied by earsplitting performances from The Velvet Underground and Nico.

Some featured “look how young!” moments of stars like Dennis Hopper, Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed and Nico, whose natural charisma made it pleasurable to look at and become acquainted with their face for four minutes. Yet some of the most moving portraits portrayed characters from the 1960s underground whose memory has not survived in quite the same way. Ann Buchanan, a minor Beat figure who once lived with Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassidy, stares at the audience nearly unblinkingly until a single tear rolls down her face near the end of the clip. And the icy-cool shot of lighting designer Billy Name, replete with sterile light reflected off his Aviator sunglasses, was perfectly matched by Dean & Britta’s “Silver Factory Theme,” an instrumental reminiscent of Brightblack Morning Light’s languid electric psychedelia.

Sometimes the performers let the aura of the tragic, self-destructive stories of the subjects, related by Wareham in between songs, hover over and haunt the portraits and songs themselves, greatly augmenting the mood of the performance. They might have overplayed the look how beautiful and tragic they were” card a little bit, but one couldn’t help but dwell on the mysterious disappearance of Ingrid Superstar or the poetic suicide of Freddy Harko while  watching them immortalized on screen  and accompanied by the perfect mood music.

Dean & Britta are certainly masters of emotion — their songs are low on concept but have an abundance of mood. And they’re no strangers to the art of soundtracking — they have score credits for several films under their belts, most notably Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale. Wareham’s crooning tenor and Phillips’ breathy flutter were both used to great effect in the 13 simple songs. They managed to pick exactly the right style to work within to best complement each screen test, whether it conjured pulsing Velvet Underground rock, the architectural ebbs and flows of post-rock, shoegaze’s washes of sound or simply old-fashioned, subdued pop, in which one can hear the relation to Yo La Tengo circa-And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out.

Thirteen songs also turned out to be the perfect length for their set, and after the last portrait faded out, the band bowed to a light smattering of applause (I’m telling you, this crowd was small — and horrible at knowing when to clap) and quietly left the stage, leaving us with the ghostly impressions of these vanished individuals and a sort of false memory of the last great revolutionary underground which almost no one in attendance was alive to witness.


Comments