Andrew Crawshaw at Broken Press, in front of some Depths posters he created.
Andrew Crawshaw at Broken Press, in front of some Depths posters he created. Dave Segal

Depths—an audio-visual night that happens every second Monday at Substation—is the logical extension of Seattle synthesizer player Andrew Crawshaw's lifelong fascination with weird cult films and the strange sounds that inhabit them. A drummer with the brutal psych-rock group Terminal Fuzz Terror, Crawshaw embarked on a solo career a few years ago as Meridian Arc, whose eerie, foreboding electronic emissions evoke tremors in the vein of vaunted soundtrackers John Carpenter, Bernard Szajner, and Goblin. When Substation talent buyer Tim Basaraba asked Crawshaw to do an electronic-music-oriented night last year, Crawshaw realized he didn't have deep enough connections in Seattle's electronic community to make that happen, but he did think he could assemble enough like-minded musicians to perform live scores before his favorite films. Hence, Depths was born.

So far, Crawshaw and his cohorts have concocted soundtracks for THX-1138, The Visitor, Begotten, The Brood, Dark Star, A Field in England, and Shock Waves. On October 10, Crawshaw, Terminal Fuzz Terror bandmate Justin Thomas Kleine, and others will have a devil of a time scoring William Friedkin's 1973 horror classic The Exorcist.

To date, I've witnessed THX-1138, Begotten, and A Field in England, and all took on much more vivid and interesting life with the new sonic improvisations—especially the terrifying existential dread of Begotten and the chilling dystopian oscillations of THX-1138. It's impressive how these musicians transform what can be overly familiar scenes with their spontaneous interpretations.

For each Depths show, Crawshaw strives to form ad-hoc groups consisting of people who normally don't play together. (Kleine and Scriptures' David Totten are usually the only other constants besides Crawshaw.) "It's a nice see-what-happens thing," Crawshaw says in an interview conducted at Broken Press, the Fremont print shop he owns with Danielle Skredsvig. "I'm trying to create new musical experiences."

Complimentary barf bag for Depths Shock Waves presentation.
Complimentary barf bag that Crawshaw provided for Depths' Shock Waves presentation. Dave Segal

Crawshaw says that he's trying to avoid "any movie that has a legendary soundtrack. I wouldn't do anything very recognizable or noted, like The Shining [done by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind] or most Tangerine Dream stuff." He also generally wants to stay away from anything Carpenter has done, except for Dark Star, because that film didn't have much a soundtrack.

Not much preparation goes into each Depths episode. The band may rehearse once before the night of the show. Typically, Crawshaw simply lets the musicians use their instincts, although he does run subtitles in order to help him cue distinct parts. "I want it to be free and loose," Crawshaw says. "I like seeing what happens when you let people do their thing. I try not to control the situation too much. We'll all agree what key to do it in and outside of that, if it works it works. If not, oh well," he says, laughing. So far, though, Crawshaw claims there have been no trainwrecks.

You'll notice a predilection for science fiction, horror, and strange cult films in Depths' lineup so far. Crawshaw grew up watching tons of sci-fi and horror in the '80s and '90s (he was born in 1983), and their soundtracks have had a profound influence on both his Meridian Arc output and on Depths. He counts The Terminator, Halloween, and Suspiria as his favorite movies of all time. Future editions may involve John Boorman's Zardoz, Sergei Parajanov's The Color of Pomegranates, and Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris. "We've talked about doing a comedy sometime, but we don't know how we'd do it," Crawshaw says with a laugh. "Sci-fi and horror movies aren't easy, but they lend themselves to brooding synthesizers, cacophonies of sound, textures, and noise."

Crawshaw acknowledges some similarities in Depths to Northwest Film Forum's Puget Soundtrack and Re-bar's Monster Planet events, but he claims Depths "is its own thing. It's a little harder because [the musicians] actually have to be watching the movie and think, 'Would I want to hear music now?' It took me a while to explain the whole thing to the new people who were playing with us, but I finally narrowed it down to just approach it like it's music that would be in the movie, and if you don't think there would be music here, don't play."

In a sense, one could view Depths as a springboard for Crawshaw's imminent career as a soundtrack composer. He laughs at the statement, but doesn't deny it. "I would love to have a career doing that. It would be fantastic if I could have the print shop and hire someone and step away from this some and do the composition work, but it seems like a fairly hard field to get into. I would hope that one day I'd be good enough that people would want to hire me for it. I made my first steps toward it by signing with a licensing agency in Portland called Marmoset. They place music for TV shows, commercials, and movies."

Crawshaw is cognizant of the impression he's jumping on a bandwagon, but his love of strange cinema and aptitude for soundtracking are genuine and profound. With this, he's poised to capitalize on the public's hunger for uneasy atmospheres, brought on by the booming popularity of Stranger Things and its moody synth score by S U R V I V E. As well as signing with Marmoset, Crawshaw has submitted a score for the Puget Soundtrack contest to get a chance to play live to Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain. "If I get it, my idea is to do it with me and a six-piece choir" Crawshaw says. "The choir will also have singing bowls and Tibetan bells. We'd do this weird, super-human, spiritual thing with a very computer/analog cold, dry thing. The original soundtrack is so far from what I do, I'm not even going to try to do my own version of that.

"If I don't get it, I did talk to [Northwest Film Forum director] Courtney Sheehan about doing a co-presented Depths thing there sometime. Because I would like to do more formal, worked-out soundtracks. I would really like to do something to Eraserhead or Dune. But I have a consciousness about the length of movies we show at Depths. I'm not going to make people sit through a three-hour movie."