Beautiful Noise, Hypnagogia Films' all-star documentary on the so-called shoegaze sound, has been circling above sonic geeks for years. Now director Eric Green is looking to Kickstarter to kick the project into final overdrive.
"It has been a long road but this seems to be the only path forward," Hypnagogia honcho Green told Wired in an exclusive interview as Beautiful Noise's Kickstarter went live Thursday night. "The documentary has been finished creatively for a while but the insanely massive clearance costs have made it near-impossible to release."
That's a bit of irony, considering that the film's musical anchors – Cocteau Twins, The Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine, whose mad musical genius Kevin Shields recently announced the band's first new album in more than 20 years – haven't really shaken the sonic landscape since the early '90s. But that's likely a tell of how prodigious their influence remains, and how desperate what's left of the music industry is to cash in on whatever's in reach.
"We had interest from many distributors, but everything came back to the cost of clearances," Green said. "But we're very excited about the film we created, and we're dying to get it seen by the fans. The timing feels right now, because Kickstarter has become the standard for truly indie artists like ourselves."
Like Shields, who plans on independently releasing My Bloody Valentine's highly anticipated follow-up to its epochal Loveless on the band's website before the end of the year, Green is going directly to the people to distribute his musical explorations.
The synchronicity seems ideal, given the unclassifiable My Bloody Valentine's sudden resurgence. "Shields is a brilliant artist, and an incredibly interesting and friendly man," said Green. "I've been looking forward to hearing a new My Bloody Valentine record since 1991!"
The exhaustive four-hour interview with the musician for Beautiful Noise is one of the longest on record. "Four hours at 4 a.m.," laughed Green. "The guy in the lobby of the hotel thought he was my older brother."
