Below are the liner notes I wrote to accompany the brilliant score that Anaphylaxis (aka Jason Coffman) provided for my new film RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO. The film will not premiere until this fall but you can listen to the entire soundtrack by streaming it (or, for a measly $3, downloading it!) at Bandcamp now. Enjoy!

The music cues I wrote into the script for RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO describe the soundtrack as containing “dreamy and ethereal electronic pop.” As late as the film’s pre-production stage, in March of 2018, I still had no clue who I was going to approach about composing the original score when a funny thing happened: I heard the sensational new Anaphylaxis album DARK LOVE, DARK MAGIC. I instantly knew that it was the exact sound I had been looking for. The driving rhythm and shimmering synthesizer of “Blue Devil Suite” sounded custom-made for my planned opening-credits sequence featuring abstract shots of the guardrail on Lake Shore Drive. “To Burgundy and Back” — and its accompanying eerie “brushed bell” stem track — possessed a dark majesty that I knew would provide the necessary counterpoint to the rapid-fire screwball-comedy dialogue of my first scene between Clare Cooney and Kevin Wehby. I soon realized that I wouldn’t need a composer after all; digging through the Anaphylaxis back catalogue gave me such riches as “Lin Minmei,” a full-on house jam that proved the perfect accompaniment to our “strip literary trivia” sequence, and “Dr. Nera Vivaldi,” a minimalist, acoustic guitar-driven song that underscored the poignancy of the extended scene where Rashaad Hall and Matt Sherbach’s characters walk from their Rogers Park home to the lakeshore nearby.

There was only one problem: we had one day left to lock picture before the movie was due to move on to color correction and post-sound mixing when my editor, Eric Marsh, informed me that we needed an additional song — one that could play under a scene in which Nina Ganet’s character finds her boyfriend in bed with another woman. As if right on cue, I received an email from Jason Coffman, mastermind behind Anaphylaxis for the past quarter century, informing me he had just composed a new track for the film entitled “Midsummer Masque.” Although Jason had yet to watch any of the footage and I had not spoken with him about the kind of music we needed for the film’s third part, “Midsummer Masque” began with an ominous burst of electronica that seemed to emphasize Nina’s righteous anger with sublime aptness; it was as if Jason and I had been in telepathic communication when he composed the track. When I saw how Eric married this song to the galvanic moment of Nina slamming the front door to her character’s apartment I nearly wept with gratitude at the cosmic coincidence of what Jason had done. Then again I remembered an old saying about how there are no coincidences. The soundtrack album for RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO consists of the aforementioned tracks plus a 1923 recording of blues legend Eva Taylor singing “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home,” a then-new composition co-written by her husband Clarence Williams. The resulting compilation offers something old and something new, and serves as an ideal introduction to the wonderful sonic world of Anaphylaxis.

— Michael Glover Smith, June 2, 2018