POP MUSIC REVIEW : Far Flung Meets ‘Joan of Arc’: Far-Fetched Yet Effective

Barely a month after opening its doors, the Huntington Beach Art Center is off to a good start, bringing depth charges of culture to this beach town and expanding Orange County’s art and performances options in general.

It’s the kind of place where, every other Friday through June 9, visitors can bask in roiling, inventive sounds of an experimental late-night music series, “Errant Bodies Amplified,” while the weekend crowd buzzes and loiters a few blocks farther down on Main Street.

In its second installment last Friday-night-cum-Saturday-morning, the series organizer, Brandon LaBelle, took the stage with his band Far Flung. Normally, the group veers in a rock direction, but they wore different hats this night, providing contoured washes-of-noise as a live soundtrack to Carl Dreyer’s classic 1928 silent film, “The Passion of Joan of Arc.”

Dreyer’s film is a painstakingly detailed feast of probing close-ups and tilted camera angles, a slowly churning depiction of the martyr’s oppression and demise. We dwell at length on actress Renee Falconetti’s pained, heavenward face as a metaphor of abused innocence, in contrast to the sadistic piety of her interrogators.

To all of this, the band brought a texture-producing arsenal of guitar feedback, rumbling tom-toms and delay loops, reflecting the tension and tortured faith pulsing through the film. Wisps of archival songs and arias flitted into the turbulent din. By film’s end, Joan has been martyred, the villagers rise up and, well, all hell breaks loose. Likewise on the Art Center stage.

The practice of creating original soundtracks to silent films has gained a foothold lately, as heard in the Clubfoot Orchestra’s numerous projects, Bill Frisell’s recent scores to Buster Keaton films, and Marc Dresser’s score to “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” recently released on Knitting Factory. The Far Flung approach, relying mostly on from-the-hip soundscapes, was crude but effective, lending an irreverent, gruff veneer to a masterpiece.

Kelly Martin opened the program with post-punkish spoken-word and sung observations about Los Angeles, “so named because there are so many people dying to survive.” Martin, accompanied mostly by Sonic Youth-ful open-tuned guitar slashing, dished out smart chunks of alienation and disaffection, made all the more stark by the lack of a band.

The taste for diversity and reports from the fringe front, heard in Friday’s show, amount to an agenda that one hopes will become a habit here.