Not that the trilogy has officially come to an end, The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt has plenty of extra times on his hands (well, ahead of those Realism tour dates of course!) So, he recently completed a score for the 1917 silent film version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and, on May 4th, will unveil the finished product during a live performance at an Francisco’s Castro Theatre, as part of the San Francisco Film Festival, Pitchfork reports.
“I’m going to try to musicalize it to be more or less in sync with the moving lips of the actors, who actually talk a great deal, considering it’s a silent film,” Merritt tells Exclaim, which of course means this thing is probably going to be extra-ordinary! What’s more, the Magnetic Fields frontman plans to release the endeavor at some point in the future.
Speaking of the Fields, Merritt also told Exclaim that he has already begun thinking about the band’s next studio album, specifically its musical composition:
“Well, actually the problem was that there were no interesting new sounds to be played at the time,” Merritt said in regards to the band’s now finished triology. “So, I thought I would give up the synthesizer for a while until there was something. Three albums seemed to be long enough, and now, in fact, there are new synthesizers and I’ve been collecting those. So, clearly the next Magnetic Fields album will have synthesizers on it but probably all new ones — probably no synthesizers that people have been familiar with.” That’s good, because synthesizers are so 2009!