Label: Starlight Furniture Co.

Release Date: June 2, 2003

Website: www.cut-out.org

Cut-Out - Interlude With Fun Machine
Tyler Baber

FADE IN

EXT. TWILIGHT- URBAN INDUSTRIAL PARK

Street lights flicker on, a 1955 Cadillac drives past the camera riding on its breaks. The car parks, a young man in a green velvet suit steps out of the car and looks directly at the camera. He walks to the back of the Cadillac and opens the trunk, pulls out a box-like piano and sets it on the ground. "FUN MACHINE" is written across the front of the piano, the man pushes a button and the soundtrack comes on.

The man begins to play the "FUN MACHINE" laying down simple layers of pulsating beats or ambient off-white noise. As more layers of futuristic-keyboard sounds are added, different characters walk in from all sides of the complex.

FADE OUT

Steve Fisk and Robert Beerman's soundtrack-ready music in their guitar driven group Pell Mell gets a new spin as the two trade strings for synthesizers in their debut as Cut-Out, Interlude with Fun Machine. The beats and layers and phases and clicks provide a mental soundtrack to a post-modern masterpiece, perfect for helping the listener feel a part of the world of P.T. Anderson or David Lynch. Fun Machine’s non-descript background music adds a twist of quirkiness to the normal, like walking out of a Coen Brothers movie to realize that the world of the film just watched is no more peculiar as the world in which you live.

Fisk and Beerman's score for the everyday is not meant to be focused upon reflectively or to provide the listener with insight into her soul. It is background music in its purest form. Interlude with Fun Machine is the equivalent of actors in a musical bursting into song as if it happened all the time. It is an unobtrusive compliment to normal goings-on, your very own soundtrack designed especially to draw you as a viewer to pay special attention to the strange details of life because you never know when they will add to the twist at the end. Moments of suspense are followed with bursts of joy followed with instances of plot-thickening character development. Talk to yourself, walk through the grocery store casually, and stare at goldfish. These are the types of activities normal people do in the worlds of films like Punch Drunk Love and Bottle Rocket, and those people are as normal as those in the real world. The only difference: their soundtracks change their lives from a documentary into a narrative. Cut-Out has the same effect.

posted 05.13.03

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Tyler probably isn't as clever as he'd like to think. E-mail him cookies at tb1191@messiah.edu

2003 White Elephant Productions