Music by Sparklehorse, Radiohead, Travis, Air, Gorillaz, Cibo Matto and other acts will be included in the second season of the Sundance Channel's Sonic Cinema, a three-episode series that features collaborations between music and film, as well as clips and documentaries that feature commentary from the musicians, filmmakers, photographers and graphic designers who are included in the show.

The new season kicks off on September 12th with Sonic Cinema: Video to Screen. The episode includes seven videos show by four filmmakers: Roman Coppola (Air's "Playground Lover" and God Lives Underwater's "From Your Mouth"), Jamie Thraves (Radiohead's "Just," Travis' "All I Want to Do Is Rock" and the short film "Negative"), Michael Gondry (Cibo Matto's "Sugar Water") and Chris Cunningham (Aphex Twin's "Window Licker").

The second episode, Sonic Cinema: Animators, will run on October 19th. Animators includes two Jamie Hewlett-directed videos for Gorillaz, the animated Damon Albarn side-project, that, driven by the lead single, "Clint Eastwood," has proved to be an unexpected hit in the U.S., having sold nearly a million copies. Also featured in the segment are clips for Daft Punk's "One More Time" and "Aerodynamic," both directed by Anime pioneers, Toei Animation Studios.

The final segment focuses exclusively on the experimental sounds of Sparklehorse and frontman Mark Linkous. Sonic Cinema: Sparklehorse features ten clips, the majority of which are based on the group's third album, It's a Wonderful Life, which was released this past summer.

"It started out as this little art project between me the Sundance Channel and my rocker friends," Linkous says of the episode. "And the only rockers turned out to be Jason [Lytle] from Grandaddy and [Jonathan] Donahue from Mercury Rev. It was like, 'Let's take my record and I'll send you a camera and just pick a song and film shit to it.' It turned out being just those two rockers and the rest being very great filmmakers. All these people do their films for certain songs and some songs that ain't on the record."

Testament to the range of Linkous' sonic crayon box, the diverse crop of filmmakers offer a wide array of visuals to complement the music: from Guy Madden's nostalgic, carnivalesque black-and-white narrative on the title track to the Brothers Quay's unsettling use of a pair of dolls (a menacing wolf and a prone woman) in "Dog Door/Heloise" to Garine Torossian's fascinating use of children's books and collage in "Babies on the Sun" to a remarkable series of expressions Grant Gee captures on a passing series of faces along a bus route for "Devil's New." Linkous himself makes several appearances, including some performance clips separate from the tracks that appear on It' a Wonderful Life.

Sonic Cinema: Sparklehorse will premiere on October 26th.

ANDREW DANSBY
(October 8, 2001)