Guardrail Jaws 007

Guardrail, a band based out of Dover and the Seacoast of New Hampshire, now on hiatus from weekly practices in a crimson-floored basement, proudly released Guardrail Jaws 007, a soundtrack DVD and video on 5 August 2016. The video is based on MKUltrasound's experiment combining Jaws (released a day before the summer solstice in 1975, EST) and The Spy Who Loved Me (released on 7 July '77).

Fueled by Budweiser, vodka, and badji, the soundtrack is based on a series of field recordings from 2014-2015 made on an Olympus digital voice recorder in single, often improvised takes among blacklights, laser-lit masks, and Marilyn Monroe posters. Guardrail was attempting to assemble some of their recordings into a Jaws soundtrack throughout 2014 and 2015, to deliver us from the tyranny of John Williams. 

When David Plate's compilation of Jaws and The Spy Who Loved Me emerged, it proved too good to not be included as the basis for the soundtrack. His conjoined film is synced with an audio track of Styx's The Grand Illusion, released on the same day as The Spy Who Loved Me: 7-7-77. As a key work of perhaps the world's preeminent Movie/album Merge Master, David's video album is a perfect sync, particularly in the trifecta of sections for "Come Sail Away." The Guardrail soundtrack using his video is not meant to detract from that work in any way. On the contrary, Guardrail Jaws 007 is meant to highlight the sublimity of how MKUltrasound's two films are linked. Characters, dialogue, and other symbolism are juxtaposed vertically with continual, and often blatant, connections between the two films. Reoccurring themes, like the two films' predilection for men who wear taupe, provide constant reinforcement for their paired significance.

Recording the songs only occasionally intended to serve specifically as a backing audio track for Jaws, and in those rare cases, the film was not played during recording sessions. In that way, creating the soundtrack was an experiment in synchronicity, with many of The Spy Who Loved Me syncs occurring spontaneously, as an unexpected surprise from the creative aether. For example, in that film's scene where Bond skis off an Austrian cliff face (actually Canada's Mount Asgard on Baffin Island) into a parachute jump (performed in July of 1976 for $30,000 by stuntman and BASE jumper, Rick Sylvester), the song "Down by the River (Martha)" was originally synced with Jaws alone. The timing of the slow motion ski drop sync with the exact start of the first verse (at 0:07:39) appeared only after MKUltrasound combined The Spy Who Loved Me with Jaws in 2016:

 “East five and five street, saw you standing there,   

Penthesilea, Gold Dust in The Air”

The unintentional synchronicities of that scene continue as Bond unfurls a Union Jack parachute (Roger Moore claimed in commentary for the film that Sylvester was nearly killed by a ski almost interfering with the chute's opening) at 0:07:52:

 “Venus Rising near the sun"

The small white and black lead parachute serves as a transiting Venus to the main parachute's British Sun. To underline the stupefying satisfaction of a sultry sync revealed, the next shot shows 007 in relationship to the Jaws characters above him.

 “hiding near the moon, three almost one"

In the Guardrail soundtrack, the next line of "Down by the River (Martha)" is at 0:08:00. Here, Bond forms the posture of the "Mason in Distress" with  Police Chief Martin Brody above him, played by Roy Schneider, who plays moon resonator Dr. Heywood Floyd in 2010. He is joined by the key witness to Chrissie's last swim, who serves as Venus to Brody's Moon and Bond's Sun: they are the "Three are almost one" in cosmological conjunction, referred to in the lyrics.

The above sequence of shots was not timed intentionally with the Guardrail Jaws 007 soundtrack, joining countless synchronicities which were a surprise or an unconscious outcome to many music and image parings. In other cases, the syncs were directly crafted, such as the scene in Jaws where oceanographer Matt Hooper pulls a license plate out of a Tiger Shark's stomach and the plate reads "007," perhaps the sin qua non of David Plate's double movie/music discovery.

 007: License (plate) to kill

Below the spy plate that links the two films like the Sistine Chapel's hand of God, Anya Amasova/Agent Triple X appears, played by Barbara Bach, the wife of Ringo Starr. Agent XXX embodies the Venus/Marilyn Monroe role in The Spy Who Loved Me while Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) serves that role through a seafaring gender substitution in Jaws. The timing of the Guardrail soundtrack was specifically manipulated so that cymbal flourishes coincide with each fish corpse that Dreyfuss pulls out of the shark's guts (partially at 43:58 and more closely in a 44:07 closeup) until a distinctive bass drop announces a cymbal/symbol crash when the license plate hits the floor (44:19).

Fireball/missile I: 

"He loved to drink his Whiskey, While laughing at the moon"

A partial Guardrail cover of War's "Slippin' into Darkness" (1971) represents the scene where Roy "Moon" Schneider contemplates mortality while stroking a high caliber revolver and a fireball/missile/UFO flies from right to left (1:36:03), part of Spielberg's signature series of  "shooting stars" in many of his films. In this scene, a guitar fill moving up the neck was deliberately overdubbed to highlight and coincide with the appearance of the first fireball.

 Fireball/Missile II: "Honest John"

Another deliberate musical highlight occurs in the next shot when a second "shooting star" moves left to right on screen (1:36:14), simulated by a guitar fill moving down the neck. This flying object recalls lyrics from the second Guardrail track, "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Marilyn," a partial rendering of Van Halen's "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" joining an improvisational verse about, "Honest John and his football stars." The "shooting star"/ missile scenes in both films transform this lyric into a direct reference to the "Honest John," MGR-1, the first nuclear-capable surface-to-surface missile in the US arsenal. Decommissioned versions of this rocket adorn at least two American high schools (and their football teams) as phallically potent militarized mascots.   

In a later scene in The Spy Who Loved Me, during Guardrail's "End," two nuclear devices are fired from a Russian and an American nuclear submarine, crossing paths from right to left and left to right as a mirror image of the Jaws meteorites (1:48:08). 

After a Ghostbustersesque crossing the streams moment when the missile spermatozoa nearly collide and Quint stares onward like a Kubrickian Jack Torrence or Private Pyle, the contemporary possibility and strategic fallacy of "limited nuclear exchange" is envisioned in stock footage (1:48:44).

A fire on board the Orca (previously known as the "Warlock" when Quint purchased it in Nova Scotia) is mirrored by an atomic fireball below. Quint's visceral hatred of sharks stems from a WWII experience when his ship, the USS Indianapolis, was torpedoed after delivering, "The Hiroshima bomb." In Quint's (Robert Shaw's) epic speech describing the shark-fueled brutality that followed, "eleven hundred men went into the water. 316 men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb."

 CARCHARODON CARCHARIAS = 33

Deliberately designing a movie/music sync demonstrates that such pairings can be consciously created with minimal resources, proving insight into the potential intentionality of many of the movie music mergers that MKUltrasound, iAhuasca, and others have identified. Simultaneously, even while consciously manipulating the merger of sound and vision in some places, spontaneous meaning emerges through unexpected and mystical moments in others. Art happens. These unconscious syncs are often more symbolically powerful than those that are consciously created. As pure entertainment, it beats binge watching the fourth season of Girls, I can tell you that much. As Jungian exercise, it is a deep dive into symbolic fathoms beyond measure.