The Audition - No Age

No Age has been the most effective L.A. buzz band of the early 21st century. They've played concerts in museums and libraries, in backyards and in the drainage channels of the L.A. River. They've popularized, if not created, a sound for Los Angeles: a woozy and distorted ambient punk rock that echoes the endless hum of freeway traffic. They're the reason why kids in Iowa can talk about The Smell, one of the smallest L.A. venues. Most of all, the band, with their critically-acclaimed records and, well, their buzz, have given savvy Angelenos a point of pride, a rebuttal against the endless wave of Brooklyn blog bands.

But there is a statute of limitations on buzz. Around the second album, bands that run on buzz run out of tiny theaters to rock and poses to strike. Fortunately for Randy and Dean of No Age, they've been running on something more. So while their clothes have been photographed, their look turned into trend, No Age have been working on something they care about: scoring the soundtrack for a children's movie live in a tiny theatre.

During the last weekend in August, Cinespace, the Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax Ave., hosted two sold-out shows with the L.A. duo, who graciously unboxed their instruments and played over the entirety of director Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 1988 children's film L'ours (The Bear). The film follows a simple man-versus-wild formula, with an adorable young bear cub in the lead.

Despite what you might think about a punk duo scoring a pastoral children's movie, No Age proved singularly qualified for the gig. The most innovative songs on their soon-to-be-classic Nouns are the fuzzy, ambient bridges that link the more traditional songs together—or, the holes between the music, as Jeff Tweedy would say. These songs have informed No Age's score for The Bear, an ever-growing analogue groan, sunny during cute bear cuddling scenes and suffocating in tense bear hunting scenes. The film’s long, wordless stretches gave the band space to craft intense, mood-shifting music that gives the film a modernity and meaning it didn’t have before.

No Age passed the audition. They made a soundtrack extraordinary enough to stand on its own that simultaneously adds to and rises above the film it accompanies. Now they deserve a better paying gig in this other L.A. music industry. You know the one I mean. The one with the moving pictures.

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine