Matthew Nolan is making music for a modern Metropolis

Matthew Nolan of 3epkano says the extra footage found of Fritz Lang’s classic has changed the tone of the 1927 film.

Don’t think that when Dublin post-rockers and soundtrack specialists 3epkano present their latest live score they will be coasting on past glories.

To celebrate their 10th anniversary the band performed a live score for Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis at the National Concert Hall last July, and will repeat the performance in Cork on Friday.

The choice is significant. It recalls a milestone in their career; their first time being specially requested by an organisation to do a soundtrack was when the Dublin Film Festival asked them to perform a score to Metropolis at their 2007 event.

Metropolis has had a long and tortured existence. The original version clocked in at 153 minutes but fell foul of censorious German officials who objected to the film’s communist subtext. The Metropolis 3epkano first scored was lacking 35-minutes of original footage, but in 2008 an original cut of the film was found in Argentina.

The restored version now stands at 148-minutes and has reintroduced some major plot points. This left 3epkano founder and guitarist Matthew Nolan with a challenge. “Our initial score was something that we were very proud of but the film itself, in the previous version that had existed until four-years ago, is very clunky and the story is quite inconsistent. When the new film was released I was fascinated by the challenge that it would pose,” says Nolan.

“All of a sudden what had been a very clunky and eclectic narrative suddenly made sense and the inclusion of characters that took on a new importance and relevance to plot development.

“And I realised that actually this was going to be a very big challenge musically because it’s a very different film. The narrative hasn’t changed but the tone has. The depths to which characters and character psychology is explored has been radicalised by virtue of this extended version.”

This new vista of psychological nuance and subtext is grist for Nolan’s mill. “I’m interested in teasing out a more subtle, emotional response rather than an overtly visceral one from our audiences,” he says. “Maybe that says something about my mindset in the sense that I’d rather make them cry than jump up and down.”

Set in a dystopian world where workers toil underground at huge machines while the wealthy live a life of leisure in the city above, the stunning images in Metropolis of a mechanised society would suggest the use of repetition in the music.

Nolan, who teaches film studies, resists that approach. “I think that would be really tedious and you’ll just end up playing the kind of music, well the bad music to my mind, that is synonymous with silent film culture which is music that bounces around following the action.

“In many ways Metropolis invites you to go that route and the difficulty for us was not giving in to that. We certainly do it on occasions. If anything we have included a couple of almost Krautrock pieces into the score but for the most part we’ve resisted that kind of temptation. I think we would have ended up with something, especially across a two-and-a-half-hour film, that would have been too repetitious and maybe too one-dimensional.”

Although it’s almost 90-years-old, Nolan believes the film speaks to our technology-obsessed society.

“What kind of worries me is that kind of loss of self, loss of identity, and the kind of alienation that comes with embracing technology and allowing technology to take too big a place within our daily lives.”

- 3epkano will perform a score to Metropolis at the Triskel Christchurch on Friday. Doors 8pm. €15.