Gabó brings back electro-scoring to silent film with Buster Keaton

Gabriel Pulido, aka Gabó, will once again bring his unique ambient music stylings to a silent film at the Miami Beach Cinematheque. Last year, Pulido produced an experimental score of electronic noise for the silent surrealist film classics by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age D’or (1930) at the cinema (Gabriel Pulido brings soundtrack craft to the early films of Luis Buñuel). But now his visual will come from a decidedly different, though no less pioneering cinema artist: Buster Keaton.

The slapstick comedy of Keaton offers very different imagery from the surrealist works of Buñuel. However,  Pulido states via email from his new home in New York, this does not mean either artist does not cross over into territories of humor. “Even as The Buñuel films I did music for had a comic edge, Buster Keaton has his unique universe,” writes Pulido. “Musically I am trying to cross the original (played in theaters back then) music’s melodic and harmonic language with kitsch seventies and eighties raw synthetic sounds. Those old Casiotone rhythmic machine sounds might also show up!! It’s going to be fun.”

Pulido has put in some impressive work— once again— in studying the film he will score, Keaton’s 1924 sea-faring adventure the Navigator. “I’ve been watching the film several times, spotting the important moments and moods, analyzing the existing music, and writing some ideas on different synth sounds for different registers (bass parts, mid-range, etc). I am also creating motifs to the main characters. I basically create frameworks and sound palettes with which I can play live.”

—Hans Morgenstern