Join XRAY as we sponsor a screening of the British documentary Beautiful Noise, a film that explores shoegaze artists My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Slowdive, Ride, Chapterhouse, Lush, Curve, Swervedriver, and others. 

You can watch the trailer here.

DIRECTOR: ERIC GREEN

Beautiful Noise features interviews with many interesting characters including Billy Corgan, Wayne Coyne, Robert Smith, Trent Reznor, and several others.  

“An in-depth exploration of the dense, sensuous, and extremely loud movement 
in ‘80s/’90s U.K. rock tagged “shoegaze” by the British press. Tracing its influences back to the Cocteau Twins’ ethereal ambiance and the Jesus and Mary Chain’s brash guitar sound, the film explores how bands like My Bloody Valentine, Ride and Lush fused these two disparate sounds together to create a distinctive, new musical style that furthered the genre’s ideals of sonic experimentation without the grandiose stage personas of traditional pop stars. First-time director Eric Green scores a coup by getting this notoriously press-shy bunch to open up about the class politics behind the genre’s poor treatment in the British press, MBV’s infamous falling-out with Creation Records, and how that band became sonic innovators whose music is only now truly receiving its  due respect.”—Seattle International Film Festival. (90 mins.)

More on the Reel Music Festival can be found here:  NW FIlm Center

Welcome to our 32nd edition of Reel Music. We’ve been on the lookout all year for new works—and timely classics— for this annual celebration of sound and image, music and culture, and the origins of sounds infused in our experience. Whether your passion is jazz, blues, rock, soul, folk, funk, or punk, we hope you find this mixture of old and new, familiar and strange, to be full of inspiration and discovery. As always, our special thanks go to Music Millennium, Willamette Week, Walker, Day & Koch LLP, Oregon Music News, KINK.fm, MusicFestNW, All Classical Portland, KIND Healthy Snacks, XRAY.FM, KMHD, PDX Pipeline, Yelp!, Vortex Magazine and Portland Radio Project.

Unless otherwise noted, all movies are shown at the Whitsell Auditorium, in the Portland Art Museum.