“Guys, thank you for coming to my midlife crisis,” said Eric André, standing on a podium in front of the Colburn Orchestra in a black tuxedo with tails and wielding a baton. “I started getting tattoos,” he continued, “and then I thought: not difficult enough. Why don’t I compose some really niche, obscure film scores for films that don’t exist and burden your Monday night?”
Imagine getting high and watching a concert where Bugs Bunny conducts an orchestra, except Bugs Bunny is on cocaine. That’s sort of what this experience felt like — and, to be fair, the scholarly Zipper Hall at the Colburn School of Music has likely never smelled more of pot. But it really happened. The anarchic, frequently screaming, frequently high comedian, host of the Emmy-winning “The Eric Andre Show,” wasn’t pulling one of his signature pranks on an audience who paid to see him conduct his original compositions for orchestra and electronics.
Or was he?
Eric André conducting on stage alongside Prateek Rajagopal, who collaborated with him on his debut classical album.
(Carianne Older)
The concert, which took place April 27, was in promotion of a new album, “Film Scores for Films That Don’t Exist,” which André composed with serious help from Prateek Rajagopal, a 31-year-old composer and guitar player, out now on Stones Throw Records under the name of André’s band, Blarf.
“We dare you to market this,” says André, 43, lounging in basketball shorts in a piano classroom at Colburn two days before the show.
The musical project comes as a shock to most people who know André as the guy who, on his long-running Adult Swim show, often demolished his own set and terrified celebrity guests, or from his prank-based Netflix movie “Bad Trip,” where he freaked out unaware bystanders by sticking his hand in a blender or getting his clothes sucked into a vacuum (and a few other things that would be unseemly even to describe in a family newspaper).
Eric André projects a photo of him as a young classical music student during his recent show in L.A.
(Carianne Older)
But, as André explains, “I was obsessed with music since I was a child, like since kindergarten. I only pivoted to comedy because I didn’t know really how to make money making music.”
Growing up in south Florida, André started taking piano lessons when he was 5, and played tuba in middle school and cello in high school. He took up the double bass in 11th grade, and then, as he explained to the Colburn audience, “went to Berklee College of Waste Your Money Music to play the ‘Seinfeld’ theme song on upright bass for four years.”
He formed the Frank Zappa-styled Blarf with classmates at Berklee, but “as I was finishing college,” he says, “I just didn’t see a future in jazz bass.” So he turned to stand-up comedy. “You know, I had to make my immigrant father rub his temples even harder.”
André wrote some “goofy songs” for his talk show and co-wrote and performed more goofy songs in “Bad Trip” — at one point breaking into a love ballad, “I Saw a Girl Today,” in front of unsuspecting diners in a food court. It was while supervising that film’s score, written by composers Ludwig Göransson and Joseph Shirley, that André expressed an itch to get some of these “film scores” floating around in his head out into an orchestra.
“Where does anyone’s creativity come from?” he says when asked about this. “It’s a neurochemical con job. It’s just synaptic, electronic explosions in your brain. It’s just a meat computer,” he says, bursting into his infectious, double bass laugh.
Prateek Rajagopal and Eric André.
(Harry Israelson)
Joseph Shirley referred André to Rajagopal, a recent (at the time) graduate from USC’s screen scoring program who was described as “a musical wizard.” André, whose influences range from Ren & Stimpy to John Carpenter to Ennio Morricone to György Ligeti, found an unlikely brother in Rajagopal — an Indian musician who grew up in Muscat, Oman, and then went to college in Mumbai, whose tastes were shaped by Indian film music as well as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails.
“Eric and I have a lot of similar influences in terms of just people who are singular,” says Rajagopal, “who have a perspective that’s not just off-center, musically, but even in the way they show up as artists.”
Rajagopal was also skilled, and patient, enough to translate André’s chaotic voice memos — on which he would describe what melody or rhythm the violas or percussion, et cetera, should be doing — into MIDI demos. Over the course of five years, André and Rajagopal co-created these instrumental miniatures, which fluctuate from pastoral to death metal, and recorded them with session musicians in L.A. as well as a small orchestra in Budapest.
But is it a joke? Some of the tracks — like “Piano Concerto No. 0,” which features André literally smashing a piano to smithereens — are obviously comedic. But the straight-faced quality of the others, which include a Spaghetti Western pastiche, a disturbing cacophony called “Mercury Dripping Down My Spine” and a lilting tone poem (“Stars Without Light”), suggest something slightly more earnest. In the parlance of traditional genres, Andre’s 31-minute record would probably be shelved in the “Novelty” section.
Still, it was mostly played for laughs at the premiere concert. André entered the hall dramatically to the strains of the “Chariots of Fire” theme. “Drunk on power,” as he put it, he giddily puppeteered the orchestra like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
The actual program started normally enough, with a sweet, sprightly tune (“What’s for Dinner”), but when that piece hard-pivoted into heavy metal —with Rajagopal thrashing a black electric guitar on stage — André threw on sunglasses, pulled a Modelo tallboy out of a paper bag, chugged it, and took his beer out into the audience, where he poured it down the throat of a dude in the first row (all while the orchestra kept playing). Likely another first at Zipper Hall.
“Who thinks conducting is b—?” he asked the audience, proceeding to give a rudimentary demo of how to conduct in different time signatures. “Some assholes write in five,” he jabbed. A few minutes later: “I’m sorry to curse in front of Prateek’s parents.”
It was a strange mix of sincerity, real musicianship and bong-ripping humor. (André was persuaded by the conservatory not to smash a real piano on stage, because “a lot of people will be seriously injured.”) He played bass on one piece, provided echoey whistle effects on another, and even conducted selections by Ligeti and Georges Delerue. (“I just thought that was a beautiful-ass song,” he said after the orchestra played music from the 1963 Italian film “Contempt.”)
The evening concluded with the “1812 Overture,” but with an André twist: “We just wanted to play Tchaikovsky really out of tune, like we’re in sixth grade,” he said, segueing into a madcap, deliriously dissonant finale.
Funny, serious … who knows. What “Film Scores for Films That Don’t Exist” most certainly is, is Eric André.
