In September 2011, nestled between Centre Pompidou and the Louvre at Paris’ Forum des Images, James Bidgood’s 1971 gay fantasia Pink Narcissus was projected onto a screen next to an experimental rock band. At the request of French film fest L’Etrange Festival, the performance was to replace the film’s original soundtrack of classical suites and synthesized symphonic arrangements with a new live score written and performed by experimental forebears Tuxedomoon, an event timed to coincide with the film’s 40th anniversary.
Almost three years later, the band's score for Pink Narcissus—a seminal , dialogue-free art film that focuses on a vain street hustler’s erotic daydreams—has finally been released, and it's a formidable entry in their catalog. Over the past thirty years, Tuxedomoon have crafted a style of music that lends itself exceptionally well to cinema, even appearing as themselves in a musical interlude in the Jean-Michel Basquiat-starring pseudo-documentary Downtown 81. Still, the most reliable marker of Tuxedomoon’s music since the group’s origin has always been its reluctance to align with any one predetermined genre. Try crossing Devo’s discordant pop-rock with the Velvet Underground’s weirdo cool and you’re close; throw in classically-informed instrumentation, shrieking punk vocals, and warped synthesizers and you’re even closer. In the Forum des Images, however, the group’s sound was more precise, more atmospheric. Textured with delicate piano, nature recordings, and the persistent echo of horns, Tuxedomoon’s music for Pink Narcissus is a jazz-infused, late night soundscape that impeccably evokes Bidgood’s diaphanous tableaux of fantasies obscuring the harrowing realities of prostitution.
The connection between Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus and Tuxedomoon is not as tenuous as one might assume. Originally a photographer who shot for men’s physique magazines like Muscleboy and Adonis, Bidgood’s first foray into filmmaking inspired the auteur in him. He singlehandedly designed each of the painstakingly detailed sets within his shoebox tenement apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, provided makeup and costumes to the neighborhood hustlers he recruited as actors, and wrote, directed, and produced the film in its entirety. Nevertheless, in order to expedite an already eight-year process, the backers for the film completed the editing for him, a decision that prompted Bidgood to refuse to attach his name to the project. “I was protesting, which I’d heard at the time that’s what you did,” he said of the decision in an interview some 30 years later. The producers credited the film to "Anonymous", and it was immediately thought to be the work of Andy Warhol or Kenneth Anger. By the time of its release, Pink Narcissus, for all of its meticulous production, resulted in its creator taking a decade-long respite from his art.
Tuxedomoon’s history is rooted in a similar disillusionment with the American public. Formed in San Francisco in 1977, just six years after Bidgood’s film was released, Tuxedomoon were an eccentric addition to the experimental rock scene: With a mission statement that declared “anything that sounded like anyone else was taboo,” they employed various synthesizers and brass instruments to craft a perpetually forward-thinking, punk-inspired sound. The band underwent several line-up changes, most notably including performance artist Winston Tong, who penned one of their most well-known songs, the coolly reticent “In a Manner of Speaking” from 1985’s Holy Wars.
Despite Tuxedomoon’s ambitious and often compelling work, the group received harsh reviews from many U.S. critics and never seemed to fit in with their American contemporaries. The backlash resulted in a move to Europe, where they were more favorably received, and where many of the band’s members have remained since. Tuxedomoon is currently split between New York, Mexico City, Athens, and Brussels, and to this day have only performed stateside five times, choosing instead to play their extensive catalogue solely in Europe.
Made available exclusively through vinyl and digital via Brussels imprint Crammed Discs, Tuxedomoon’s Pink Narcissus is a 54-minute instrumental suite that easily stands on its own as an engrossing work of art apart from the film. With a lineup that includes core members Steven Brown, Peter Principle, Blaine L. Reininger, and Luc van Lieshout, Pink Narcissus finds the band in lean, otherworldly form. Early tracks “Dorian” and “Toreador del Amor” are effective at recreating the sedate, Parisian moodiness established on “In a Manner of Speaking”, which serves it well in conjunction with Bidgood’s prismatic cinematography. It’s in the record’s more chaotic moments, though, that Tuxedomoon tap into the dizzying seduction at the heart of Pink Narcissus. On mid-album cuts “Willie” and “Hassidic Pizza”, the flurries of horns become hypnotizing, conjuring a seedy Times Square of the past smeared in Super-8 grain with nothing more than a heavy bass line.
The comparison between the actual music chosen for Pink Narcissus and Tuxedomoon’s score is inevitable, but it’s still one worth looking at. The classical pieces in the original soundtrack, alternating between Russian 19th century composer Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Night on Bald Mountain, seemed an intentional appropriation of the music. Mussorgsky, driven to alcoholism by his repressed homosexuality, based Pictures at an Exhibition on a series of watercolors painted by the straight, young painter Viktor Hartmann, with whom he had a painfully unrequited love and to whose memory the piece is dedicated. Whether or not it was chosen by Bidgood with this knowledge in mind, the decision to include the piece in Pink Narcissus is an apt one that placed the film within a larger historical lens of repression and homosexuality, as though the ability of the film to withstand over forty years of relevance in both the queer community and pop culture at large was known as far back as the film’s 1971 debut. Tuxedomoon’s music for Pink Narcissus, while immersive and suggestive in its own right, doesn’t quite achieve that same feat. Instead, like Bidgood’s street hustler escapist fantasies, Pink Narcissus the album is a lush, sometimes unnerving trip into the dark, exposing the erotic mysteries and desires so often obscured beneath it.