Yo La Tengo, Not Afraid of the Sea, Will Beat Its Ass

Yo La Tengo Presents "The Sounds of Science"
Tuesday, September 25, 8:00 pm
Coolidge Corner Theatre
$25
Introduction by Fabien Cousteau

The third-annual Muddy River Environmental Film Series is running at Coolidge Corner Theatre. The series covers wine, global warming, and Tuvalu. Closing night features a screening of several works by Jean Painlevé, a nature filmmaker who sounds like a real-life Steve Zissou, only without the silly outfits. Painlevé's images shocked the scientist crowd, not because he made movies named "The Love Life of the Octopus" but because his nature films were also surrealist art.

In 2001, the San Francisco International Film Festival invited Yo La Tengo to compose music for Painlevé's films. The result is "The Sounds of Science," which the band will be playing live. (Painlevé's films already had music. The footage of "Le Vampire" available on YouTube is accompanied by French narration and a soundtrack that seems more appropriate for a striptease.)

Yo La Tengo's updated score takes Painlevé's art even further in the surrealist direction, as you can hear in a shaky camera recording of a "Sounds of Science" performance in Brooklyn. The band's approach to Painlevé is much more spacey and chilled-out than the original jazz tracks, so you'll hear the mellow Yo La Tengo rather than the swirly, roaring Ira-Kaplan-guitar-solo-freak-out Yo La Tengo.

Image from the DVD cover on the Yo La Tengo website.