When Crosstown Arts Events Coordinator Courtney Fly asked Corbin Linebarier if he and his band General Labor would be interested in composing and performing a live score for The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Linebarier’s first thought was, “How haven’t I heard of this?”
Prince Achmed is a 1926 silent film by German director Lottie Reiniger. Produced more than a decade before Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, it has the distinction of being the earliest surviving feature-length animated film. (No copies remain of Argentinian animator Quirino Cristani’s 1916 film El Apostol.)
Reiniger invented the concept of the multi-plane camera, an indispensable tool for animators which allows animated foreground characters to move independently of more static backgrounds. But Reiniger’s creation is unlike any of the Disney or Warner Brothers products that would come to define animation in the twentieth century. It is made entirely of intricate paper cutouts animated frame by frame against colorful backgrounds. “I do collage art, so it was really wild that Courtney from Crosstown picked this film,” says Linebarier. “I did my research and I was like, this is perfect! This one woman cut all of this out of paper, and basically invented the techniques to animate it as she did it. She was building the ship as she sailed.”
Reiniger was the lone female artist among the avant-garde film scene of 1920s Berlin. She was making animated ads and shorts when she was approached by Louis Hagen, an entrepreneur who owned a large amount of film stock that was about to expire. “He had bought up a bunch of film expecting the propaganda machine to basically eat it all up, but that didn’t happen. So he approach Lottie and at first, she was like ‘No, that’s way too much!’ But lucky for us, she decided to go along with it … I actually feel a very strong personal connection to this film, because she did every frame by hand. I just picture her hunched over, her back hurting, with a knife or a small pair of scissors. As a collage artist, I feel like I’ve been there.”
Prince Achmed is an intricately realized fairy tale which draws from 1001 Arabian Nights — a strange choice for a General Labor soundtrack. “General Labor is a punk band. We play big, aggressive, fast, loud music,” says Linebarier.
But during the pandemic, Linebarier had begun tinkering with analog synths with the encouragement of electronic musician Robert Traxler. “Robert asked us to do Memphis Concrete. That was a 20-25 minute performance of continuous music and that’s the first time I ever did experimental electronic music … I had this newfound passion for score-based stuff. I’ve always been a fan of John Carpenter movies and Danny Elfman, and I have a list of of films on my phone where the score was incredible. I knew that I wanted to do something very, very different.”
Linebarier composed much of what would become the Prince Achmed score on a baby grand piano left to him by a family friend who passed away of cancer. But finding the right notes to play turned out to only be the first step of a complex journey. “I basically taught myself how to synch midi,” he says, referring to the protocol used to allow synthesizers to communicate with other instruments. “My piano stuff ended up becoming electronic, just multi-layered life pieces”
When he brought the compositions to his bandmates Carlos Carrasco, Elijah Poston, and Mitch Mealer, the true complexity of the project became apparent. “They went to school for music, and they know sampling and Ableton Live and Logic and they know how to program. I’m like, ‘This world is over my head.’ And they’re saying to me, ‘What the hell are you doing over there?’”
The band collaboration introduced new sounds and new techniques. “All of a sudden, my pieces are being reinvented in front of the computer, and sometimes it does a thing that I could have never predicted in a million years … It is insanity. I’ve definitely never done anything like it.”
You can hear the fruits of General Labor’s months of sonic labor when they perform The Adventures of Prince Achmed at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, August 18 at Crosstown Theater.