METROPOLIS

Fritz Lang's 1926 film portrays a technological future where workers toil with mind numbing devotion to their machinery while the privileged few pursue their pleasures in palaces built in the sky. When the film first premiered in the United States, only nine of the original seventeen reels were used and the plot was simplified for presumed "American" tastes. This commonly available "public domain" version is inferior in both plot and tempo to a print restored by Giorgio Moroder. We use the restored print when we perform.

The Club Foot score premiered April 7 1991 at the Castro Theatre, San Francisco. It was the first collaboratively composed Club Foot score, with compositions by Richard Marriott, Steve Kirk, Beth Custer, Sheldon Brown, Nik Phelps and Myles Boisen. The score was recorded live in 3D audio a few months later and released on Heyday Records. We performed this score as part of the Smithsonian Institutes "Exhibit of Degenerate Art."

Marriott revised the score and presented it at the Morgan Library, New York in June 2009. It was performed by the CLUB FOOT ORCHESTRA EAST. It has also been condensed into a concert format entitled "METROPOLIS SUITE."

REVIEWS

"...an enormous palette of musical influences from which Club Foot, via its founder and creative director Richard Marriott, draws inspiration. These range from Stravinsky to the imperitives of West African folk idioms, taking in account swing, jazz, rock, blues and modernist atonality."
Peter Stack, San Francisco Chronicle

"...it was a broad mix that drew on Kurt Weill, on church chorales heard in new ways, on jazz, on minimalism, on determined tritones and on a deeply held sense of ongoing melody and variations ... At times it was hard to know what to watch - the screen with its huge vision, or the orchestra with its feverish view of the technology of music. There were big musical moments, and the versatility of the players was such that sometimes that took precedence over everything."
Daniel Webster, Philadelphia Inquirer

"With the complex, aggressive score constantly changing moods this was a very dense experience, remarkable... It was especially choice to hear avant-garde jazz barrages, modern classical atonalities and electronic effects used in appropriately menacing, tumultuous scenes."
Daniel Gewertz, Boston Herald