One of the many reasons that Marc Ribot is one of our favorite living guitarists is that it feels like he never plays the same note the same way twice. If you’ve seen him live, you’d know that those moments in which he dances between understated and audacious beauty in the studio are never preconceived and impossible to replicate. It’s a cliché perhaps, but Ribot’s compositions truly live in the moment.
In an interview posted this morning on Flavorwire, Ribot talks about this fascinating process in terms of developing a live score to Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, which was first performed at the New York Guitar Festival earlier this year, and will now get an encore at NYC’s Le Poisson Rouge. In fact, he’s taking the concept of writing new, pseudo-improvised scores to films and running with it for his next solo guitar album: “It’s going to be called Silent Movies,” Ribot said, “comprised of themes from a bunch of different things I’ve written for films real, imaginary and otherwise.”
For more on how difficulty with directors has deterred Ribot from taking on new film projects, how “a lot of potentially decent films have been ruined by music directors,” and much more, go here.