David McLean and Phil Carney: Crime Scene
Chris Horkan
The Culminating performance of the Samarbeta residency undertaken by musician David McLean & film noir writer Phil Carney.
The pair will be collaborating over the course of 10 days at Islington Mill to produce a new suite of compositions performed by a large ensemble of local Manchester musicians and actors. Including musicians from Mother, Water, Action Beat, Lake of Snakes, Drunk in Hell, Barberos & Lonelady.
The duo’s residency will focus on the long inseparable relationship between the iconography of Film Noir and Jazz, which has had profound fascination and influence on both Carney and McLean and their respective practices. Their aim is to create an evolving and highly dramatic suite of narrative led music based around Carney’s writing.
Their project’s intention is to write music explicitly to accompany narrative outside of the traditional cinematic format, explicitly dependent on writing, musical composition and acting to create a new kind of ‘Film Noir Theatre’, one that can be actively performed in traditional music spaces. This performance will be twinned with an exhibition in the Islington Mill gallery space of artwork created by the Bullet Proof Press collective and showcase some of scripts/dialogue from the production rehearsals.
