This Thursday in Reynolds Theater, Andy Warhol’s spirit will be channeled through the modern rock of Dean & Britta, performing music to accompany a showing of the artist’s “Screen Tests.”
Duke Performances is sponsoring 13 Most Beautiful...Songs for Andy Warhol’s “Screen Tests” along with the Nasher Museum of Art. The show is a fitting realization of Warhol’s multimedia exploits and serves as a de facto capstone for Big Shots, the Nasher exhibition of Warhol’s Polaroids that closes Sunday.
Dean & Britta are a band with an achingly melancholic sound that’s been cultivated throughout the last two decades. Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips played together in the dream-pop group Luna, and Wareham in Galaxie 500 before that. With the newer Dean & Britta incarnation, the duo has released two acclaimed LPs.
The show is titled in accordance with Warhol’s ’60s experimental film projects like “The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys.” The Andy Warhol Museum and The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust commissioned Wareham and Phillips in 2008 to create musical accompaniments for 13 Screen Tests, which capture Factory-era stars like Lou Reed and Edie Sedgwick in unscripted, silent visual documents averaging three to four minutes in length—Warhol made almost 500 of them in total.
There is no plot or acting in a conventional sense, Wareham explained, which is why the addition of music makes this particular Warhol series more accessible for an audience.
“It’s challenging...difficult to sit the whole way through,” Wareham said. “The addition of music to the screen tests changes them—changes the mood of it.” The transformation won’t take the form of narration for these otherwise silent films, though.
“You can’t start writing lyrics about what’s happening,” Wareham said. “That always feels intrusive—too direct. This is a little more poetic. They are more oblique references.”
Director of Duke Performances Aaron Greenwald described the process of soundtracking the Screen Tests as a natural complement to Warhol’s other work, like the Big Shots display.
“Audiences have the opportunity to go deeper inside Warhol’s idiosyncratic process, where the line between a study and a finished piece was always blurry,” Greenwald said.
Wareham reflected on the difference between contributing to conventional film scores and soundtrack performances meant to engage a live audience. Unlike Dean & Britta’s past work for the soundtrack to The Squid and The Whale, where “you can sit there and play with a flute, cello, all this stuff,” Wareham said, for Warhol, “We had to keep it restricted: guitar, bass, keyboards, electronic stuff.” On this stop they’ll also have support from Lee Waters on drums and Matt Sumrow on keyboards.
This live soundtrack will be comprised of eight lyrical songs and five instrumentals. All are original except for two fitting covers—an obscure Velvet Underground track, “I’m Not a Young Man Anymore,” and “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” made famous by Nico. The result is a total work that “ranges from dreamy, swirling pop to ominous instrumentals,” Greenwald said.
The democratization of art and beauty, along with the combination of the audio and the visual, were two core components of Warhol’s innovation, which ranged from pop to avant-garde. 13 Most Beautiful sheds new light on these otherwise difficult and overlooked historical art documents and captures peeks into the ordinary lives of glamorous figures: Nico, Dennis Hopper and Mary Waronov, among others.
Need more endorsement? Lou Reed himself came to one of the shows and saw one of his own tests soundtracked by Dean & Britta.
“He loved it,” Wareham said.
Dean & Britta will perform tonight in Reynolds Industries Theater at 8 p.m. Tickets are $22 to $28 or $5 for Duke students.
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