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.”