Black Futurist hip hop legend Sampa The Great rewrote the score for French coming-of-age cult classic, Girlhood. No Country for Old Men got sent through a Tropical Fuck Storm. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard teamed up with folk musician Leah Senior and ambient artist Fia Fiell to take on the Giallo holy grail with their live rescoring of Suspiria. Now Good Time—arguably the Saftie Brothers’ most white-knuckled ride—is getting wired up to the Hear My Eyes treatment with live help from Teether and Big Yawn.
Hear My Eyes Founder Artistic Director Haydn Green, takes us behind the scenes.

What is Hear My Eyes?

We work with highly creative contemporary musicians to write new scores for existing, artful pieces of cinema. It’s somewhere between a film screening and a live concert—a hybrid art form that invites audiences into new sensory realms.

Why create these new sensory experiences from existing cinema?

We want to change how people experience cinema. Cinema, like any art form evolves over time. We want to show how, as a global film community, we can reinvent ourselves while maintaining the essence of cinema.

The events offer an optimistic outlook, in that sense. They’re not about competing with the film’s original score. They're more about recontextualization and creating an ephemeral, immersive experience.

What’s the process?

First, our creative team—which is made up of directors, producers, film academics, film score experts, musical directors and sound engineers—do a series of workshops to decide which film to rescore.

Once we’ve finished the developmental phase and gained the appropriate approvals, we pair the film with contemporary musicians who we believe can fulfil our vision, sonically.

We pitch the compositional approach and develop a new score with them in a series of workshops and rehearsals. Then, once the composition is complete, we premier the event live at one of Melbourne’s world-class venues.

The film is screened in its entirety. The original score is removed but the other the other audio—the dialogue, foley and special effects—remains while the musicians perform their new score, live on stage.

Why change the score?

To create new meanings through one-off events that have to be experienced at a cinema.

Tell us about Big Yawn and Teether’s rescoring of Good Time.

Melbourne quintet Big Yawn performs experimental electronic music with a wash of sweeping synthesizers, heavily refracted vocal sampling, drum and bass-style live percussion and disorientating dub effects. They fuse post-punk, UK bass music, footwork and ambient sounds, and put on energetic and unrelenting live performances. The sonic textures are lush, stoned, frenetic and fun.

Teether has been steadily building a cult following in Melbourne and a reputation as one of Australian hip hop’s most idiosyncratic voices. He’s created an ethereal, hazy world that elevates the everyday into universal significance. Irrespective of genre, scene or venue, whatever Teether presents will be as exciting as it is unpredictable.

The artists have taken up our challenge to write and perform a new score to Benny and Josh Safdie’s neo-realist one-night odyssey from 2017, Good Time. It’s a frenetic, lush, exciting, and unpredictable film. And we’re sure the pairing will create a boundary-pushing night at the cinema.