Le Spectre Rouge (1907) aka The Red Spectre, is a nine minute horror fantasy directed by Segundo de Chomón, Ferdinand Zecca, It is innovative with a red tint. One reason to look forward to seeing it on a big screen is that the film itself has unusually detailed visual design. With the Alloy Orchestra's fresh music score and foley effects. it should be stunning.

Quietly and without a lot of advance publicity, one of my Mass MoCA favorites, The Alloy Orchestra, with all of three musicians and the imagination of many more, will present an unusual program of new music for short films.

Scheduled on Tuesday April 10th at the unusual time of 12:30 pm and costing just a fiver, it sounds like a fun way to give everyone’s Tuesday a lift. Perhaps it is directed at moms dealing with school vacation week, but even for adults, who minds a few youngsters having fun when that is the whole idea behind Alloy’s work.

Dragging out the “Rack of Junk”

Alloy Orchestra has composed scores for full length films, but this time it is four shorter films that Terry Donahue, Roger Miller and Ken Winokur have been making some great new music for. Utilizing its famous “rack of junk”, they thrash and grind soulful music from an unusual combination of found percussion and state-of-the-art electronics that give the Orchestra the ability to create any sound imaginable in a spectacular variety of styles. They can be a musicologists nightmare: how do you explain a combination of Music for Elevators mixed with Spike Jones in a scholarly way?

Click to read the rest at Berkshire on Stage.