I guess you could call Del Rey‘s Immemorial a “sleeper” since it wasn’t the biggest release in the world, but I still really dug it (review here), and it looks like the Chicago outfit are continuing their streak of doing cool stuff by providing an instrumental score to the 1973 animated masterpiece, Fantastic Planet. Not too much of a stylistic stretch for them, but a nifty idea anyhow, and I’m sure it’ll be a good time for anyone lucky enough to be there next week to catch it.

Info comes courtesy of the PR wire:

Psychedelic post-rockers Del Rey perform a live score to the animated sci-fi classic Fantastic Planet at Lincoln Hall on Thursday, May 5. They’ll be joined on the bill by drone merchants White/Light, who will provide accompaniment to a film by Chicago experimental filmmaker Alexander Stewart.

Since their inception in 1997 in the attic of a three-flat in Ukrainian Village, Del Rey has been keeping Chicago’s instrumental rock torch aflame, purveying their brand of sonic lyricism and rhythmic textuality from countless stages and speakers. In 2010, they released their fourth full-length, Immemorial, in North America via At A Loss Recordings (in Europe via Golden Antenna), which fused the punishing grace of the band’s riff- and percussion-driven sound to a more evocative, melodic sensibility.

The beautiful and surreal imagery of Fantastic Planet (1973) may be the perfect cinematic complement for Del Rey‘s cosmic soundscapes and epic odysseys. In the film, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, humans are kept as pets by blue humanoid alien giants called Traags. Said to be based on the Soviet occupation of the Czech Republic, the story centers on a human named Terr, who escapes the Traags and incites other humans to revolt. Del Rey will also be performing the score in Spain later in May as part of a tour based around their upcoming show at the Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona.

Lincoln Hall will provide an ideal setting for the screenings – the club is a converted movie theater.

Tags: At a Loss, Chicago, Del Rey, Illinois

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 26th, 2011 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Whathaveyou. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.