deadCENTER Blitz: A Journey Through the Past Rockumentary to Enid with local filmmaker Nathan Poppe

Black Canyon premiers 6 p.m. Friday at the IAO Gallery (706 West Sheridan). Tix are $10-ish

 

 

A lot of love can happen between moonshine and dancing…

 

Plenty of brief experiences add up to prime local filmmaker Nathan Poppe for nailing the right tone for a rockumentary that blends the rock and roll of tattoos and mustaches with the regional poetry of rural half towns and sorrowful violins.

 

As a collegiate he has played mad scientist with the media department’s camera’s at OSU. At The Oklahoman he’s studied the near extinct art of music journalism with one of that genre’s most sincere regional students, George Lang. In inspiration, he’s absorbed films by Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, local film eye Tanner Herriott … and he started exploring music in earnest after hearing The Flaming Lips for the first time. 

 

For Black Canyon’s Crosssroads For the Restless he has found a subject that is rich in lore, local flavor, and countrified skeet gun energy.

 

While shooting a performance of Riley Jantzen for the much linked V-Dub sessions Poppe came across the name of his other project Black Canyon. A band member, Jordan Ferrera, was also in the VW at the time and told Poppe about the Enid band and its high concepts. The ideas within immediately resonated with Poppe. He would shoot a video about the rustic-sounding band on $500, and in one day.

 

To Enid they went. 

 

 

Each song off Black Canyon’s -song album, and the songs represented in the 40 some minute film tells a piece of story. Each song is filmed for the documentary. The band explains the narrative of the album in the interim between each song.

 

There’s a particular power reserved for the film’s finale, for which Poppe is proud.

 

Legend has it that a David E. George killed himself in a hotel (located above what is now Garfield’s furniture in Enid) in the early 1900s. He was supposedly John Wilkes Boothe. Or, at least he would drink and brag to everyone that he “killed the best man who ever lived.” For the final song, Black Canyon plays at this fabled spot.  

 

Black Canyon is: Jake Morisse, Jordan Herrera, Madden Humphrey and Riley Jantzen

Hear more at: http://blackcanyon.bandcamp.com