The 15 year-old version of Karina is jumping up and down at the news that Brad Laner of Medicine is composing the score for Beautiful Noise. I swear I’ve written about this film before, but I can’t find a previous post on Spout about it, so here’s the rundown: directed by Eric Green, Noise is a documentary about shoegaze, the British flash-in-the-pan trend that, or a couple of years in the late 80s, sort of united stoney, droney bands like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Lush and Jesus and Mary Chain, before a press backlash made uttering the very name of the trend anathema.

(If that syndrome sounds familiar, check out the Wikipedia sections on both the shoegaze movement and its backlash, which attribute the genre’s collapse to a single Melody Maker story which referred to the genre as “The Scene Which Celebrates Itself.” After that story, shoegazers “became perceived by critics as over-privileged, self-indulgent and middle-class.” Ho-hum.)

Anyway.

By the mid-90s, most of the bands lumped in with shoegazism had either broken up or changed their sounds considerably. But the music endures; after all this time, I’m still far more enthusiastic about the bands named in this Pitchfork story than almost anything going on today. And it’s great to hear that Laner is involved in the film. LA-based Medicine hit their peak too late and had the wrong geographical credentials to earn much credibility in the indie rock world of the 90s, but I’ve always been a fan. I can’t wait to see it.

A side note on Laner: and iTunes search reveals that for a short time, laner was producing a podcast called The Marzipan Library Adhesives, essentially a radio show produced from his weird and amazing audio archives. There hasn’t been a new episode in a year and a half, but there’s five installments in the can, all downloadable for free.