FAUSTIAN PACT

Rite On

Musical production team Silver Alert present Faustian Pact as part of the Perth International Arts Festival in the Festival Gardens on Tuesday, February 14. Jim Sclavunos, the taller half of the team, talks to TRAVIS JOHNSON about music and magic.

In truth, it’s difficult to say what Faustian Pact actually is. We know it involves F.W. Murnau’s 1926 silent film, Faust. We know it involves live music and stage performance. We know that it involves, in some weird way, elements of magic - not that doves and marked cards rubbish, but real, honest to goodness, Western esoteric tradition stuff. Other than that, it’s something of an enigma.
Thankfully, Jim Sclavunos - regular Nick Cave collaborator, and former member of The Cramps, Sonic Youth, and countless other bands - is on hand to tell us what Faustian Pact isn’t.
“I had no compunction whatsoever about going in there and reediting the whole film,” Sclavunos explains. “As much as I like Murnau, it was not about presenting the film, or presenting a live musical accompaniment, which has become a bit of a tired cliché now. It was about really rethinking the whole Faust story, and presenting these other layers of meaning, and other layers of visual and sonic interest in there along with the film.”
The project’s inception came from a simple moment of off-the-cuff inspiration, spurred on by an invitation from PIAF. “We were invited by the people of the Perth International Arts Festival to present something, and off the top of my head, basically, I said ‘Yeah: Faust. I want to do an adaptation of Faust.’ I have this production team, Silver Alert, with my friend Peter (Mavrogeorgis). We have a studio together. We do remixes, we produce bands together, we’ve done all sorts of musical endeavours together over the past 10 years or so. We wanted to get out of the studio, so that was part of the idea of Silver Alert; that it could be, not just a production thing, but an all-encompassing, mutable, whatever we want it to be kind of enterprise.”
But the key to the whole endeavour was the drafting in of a third collaborator, New York based multidisciplinarian Micki Pellerano. As Sclavunos elaborates, “At the heart of the Faust story is a magic ritual, and at the heart of Micki’s whole aesthetic program... it’s all about magic, it’s all about ritual, it’s all about the arcane symbology that magic partakes of and utilises. It’s about Micki’s performance art - this theatricalised ritual.
“The first time I saw his work was a demon evocation ritual on Halloween, which was all good fun, with lots of naked chicks on stage, which is definitely a plus. But it wasn’t just the almost corny kind of thing that it could have been; it was definitely tapping into something a little deeper, psychologically, in terms of how people were acting on stage, and how people responded to it. They were genuinely in awe of it - they couldn’t believe what was being played out before their eyes.”