nothin Light Upon Blight Performs The Sound Of Fear | New Haven Independent

Light Upon Blight Performs The Sound Of Fear

John Miller’s electronic gear sent a drenching buzz through his amplifier. He flipped his console over to examine the circuit boards inside it. I might have busted this,” he said with a half-laugh.

The rest of it will work, right?” said guitarist and keyboardist Jeff Cedrone.

Oh, yeah,” Miller said.

As the opening credits to F.W. Murnau’s silent-movie classic Nosferatu rolled, Cedrone began with a descending, half-note figure on the keyboard, creating a near-instant sense of dread. Tom Hogan responded with flourishes from his cymbals, metallic moans, a quietly frantic shaker, broadening the landscape of the sound. With some deft work from his machines, Miller made a rising arc of notes that suggested only more horror. As if someone were walking closer to you out of a dark mist, and as they draw near, you realize they’re there to do you harm.

This was just a rehearsal for improv group Light Upon Blight, a practice for the real show this Friday, Oct. 28, when the group performs a live score to Nosferatu at Best Video in Hamden.

Light Upon Blight — Cedrone on guitar and keyboards, John Miller on modular synth and electronics, and Tom Hogan and Peter Riccio on drums — sprang a few years ago as a group out of the New Haven Improvisers Collective. They started off doing something that was pure noise and free jazz, and even like a doom-metal kind of thing,” Cedrone said. The group was then a trio with Cedrone, Riccio, and Neil McCarthy on saxophone, which performed at the Outer Space.

Brian Slattery Photo

Cedrone.

But how many free jazz shows can you do?” Cedrone said with a self-deprecating laugh.

He had wanted to do a live score to a film for years, and with the group shifting to the quartet it is now — with a lot of possibilities for changing rhythms, textures, and free flow of musical ideas — that seemed like a possibility. In June 2015, Light Upon Blight improvised a score to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari at Best Video. People came. The folks at Best Video were pleased. They started talking about doing another one.

And I thought, Halloween, horror,” Cedrone said. So they settled on another silent-movie classic, 1922’s Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, which they performed the day before Halloween last year — again successfully. A concept was born.

I started talking to Hank about four months back,” Cedrone said, meaning Hank Hoffman, manager at Best Video, and this year the 28th was available, and he was all for it.”

Picking Nosferatu, also from 1922, might seem like an obvious choice,” said Cedrone — we figured we’d get it out of the way,” he joked — but it’s also very well-suited to Light Upon Blight’s approach to music. The movie itself is a slow build, a descent into darkness, all the way to the final showdown with the titular vampire, leaving a lot of room for musical interpretation.

Plus, it’s extra-creepy,” Cedrone said. There’s no creepier vampire in all of cinema.”

Light Upon Blight’s method of performing live scores has changed from film to film. For Caligari, Cedrone worked out musical ideas for each scene. Häxan was pure improvisation. The group’s approach to Nosferatu falls somewhere in between.

There’s a theme for the vampire,” Cedrone said, playing a moody rising and falling motif on his keyboard. He’d worked out other ideas for other parts of the film as well, but threw most of them out” as the group played through the movie in its first rehearsal. Instead, he reduced them to a small notebook resting on the edge of the keyboard to remind him of possible shifts in tone and texture. But mostly, Light Upon Blight relied on the musical history between them, and their trust in one another, to produce the score.

All of us to some degree have an improv background, and what we come up with is better than what I would sit down and try to write,” Cedrone said. Everyone listens very well, which is kind of the key.”

Eyes glued to the screen and ears glued to each other, Cedrone, Hogan, and Miller moved their score from atmospheric doom to a heavy shuffle from Cedrone on guitar as the action in the movie progressed, back to a textured bed of uneasy notes from the dual keyboards. As Miller and Cedrone made that texture richer, Hogan added propulsion on the drums, which allowed Cedrone to switch back to skronking guitar. The score built to a screeching peak, then fell and became pointilistic as the movie’s protagonists approached an old castle. The theme Cedrone had played earlier emerged, right on cue. It was what they’d been heading toward the whole time, a first signpost, and a signal for the rising tension to come.

Light Upon Blight performs their live score to Nosferatu at Best Video, 1842 Whitney Ave., on Friday, Oct. 28 at 8:00 p.m. Check its Facebook event page for more details.

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