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Kissed is a live score to Andy Warhol's silent film series Kiss (1964) composed and performed by Philip Brophy. Presented in quadraphonic sound and based around a series of recorded and processed acoustic drum recordings by Brophy, Kissed creates a pulsating rhythmic dialogue based on the film's kissing couples.
In his catalogue essay Die, Warhol, Die for the Gallery of Modern Art's Warhol exhibition, Brophy describes Warhol's Kiss as
"... the definitive statement on Warhol's febrile mix of necrotic and erotic drives. Couples become marionettes of meat, performing slug-like probes of each other's orifices, silently egged on to kiss until death do they part. In each reel, these mortal boys and girls are born, kiss, and die in a self-immolating chemical fire as the celluloid burns bright and eventually flares into the white heat of non-existence."
Extending this concept to his score, Brophy's Kissed combines thumping with humping, bringing out the film's morbidly voyueristic thrill and engulfing the audience into a heady swirl of lip-smacking beats.
In contrast to the musicological approach taken to the live score to Philippe Garrel's Le Revelateur (Aurevelateur), the score for Kissed employs a fixed ensemble palette (drums, fretless bass, electric piano, synth embellisments and occasional sampled strings) in order to chart the erogenous rise and fall of each couple's sexual performance. Whereas musical accompaniment to cinema is largely based upon a dance around performers exchanging dialogue, Kissed sculpts dramatic arcs and shapes by 'reading into' the performers' interior states of mind. The screen clinically depicts their kiss, but it simultaneously hides all that they might be feeling both emotionally and physiologically, leaving the accompanying score to invent a passage for their interaction.
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Complete contents of this page © Philip Brophy