Find Harmony Among Chaos With Austin Weber's 'Rent Free' Score

Written by Austin Weber, an independent musician and film composer.

The joy of movie-making is collaboration. Few artistic endeavors require the talents of so many, so precisely. A movie, with its gaffers and electricians, editors, ACs, actors, and producers, has more in common with a transatlantic sailing voyage than a painting; a film requires a crew.

Coming from the relatively lonely worlds of songwriting and sculpture, I look forward to movie-making like a dog to the park, doubly so when I get to work with friends. I’m lucky enough to count Jacob Roberts (producer, lead-actor) and Fernando Andres (writer, director) among my best.

I began work on Rent Free soon after picture-lock. Fernando and Jacob visited my studio on Mount Washington, a steep-canyoned enclave of green in North-East Los Angeles, where we spent a long weekend listening, watching, trading references and stories, and finding the sound of the movie. The scope of work was large—the full score and an album’s worth of original songs, and we easily fell into the free-flowing collaboration that defines our working relationship.

Austin Weber

Rent Free is a movie propelled by chaos—scrappy, horny, manic, hilarious chaos. My score's purpose was therefore equally to enhance and to offset this chaos. Like the plot itself, the music arrives in lapses and lurches, alternating and accentuating manic episodes and providing melancholic respite. The melancholic respite came quickly (as it often does—ask any songwriter). Before we finished our first pot of coffee, the birdsong outside my studio began to co-mingle with the aching, open warmth of slowed-down mellotron and lap steel. The true chaos was a harder puzzle to solve.

In a world as ordered and intentional as movie-making, where few things happen by chance, engineering chaos is a feat of artistry. Fernando’s script and direction in Rent Free itself is a masterclass in this engineered chaos. I remember the surprise I felt when Jacob told me that every line in the movie was scripted. “Even the snot?” I remember asking. “Even that scene with the cigarette?” “Everything.”

Rent Free mostly follows Jacob’s character, Ben, half of the main duo and the main agent of chaos, basking in the grimy depths of his mid-20s with the grace of a seal on land. I began to imagine the inner workings of Ben’s head, mechanically. What gears are running up there? What stuff is it made of? What’s the input? The output?

I visualized the Looney Tunes lens (perhaps the most profoundly poetic American art). I pushed into Ben’s head and finally beheld with clarity his inner workings flip-flopping between a tiny box crammed with whizzing ping-pong balls and an impossibly vast landscape of thousands of little thoughts randomly bursting and zooming like balloons under an invisible pin. I began to devise ways of harnessing this vast staccato randomness, rifling through my decades worth of percussion knick-knacks and LAROs (Large Arrays of Random Objects), but nothing was quite right. After a few hours, I knew that to get the sound I was searching for, I would have to build it.

I love building. The joy of encountering an idea or a problem and subsequently bringing into the world by my own hands the solution is incalculable. Like all creative acts, it’s equally imagination and engineering. I grew up learning alongside my Grandpa (a musician and inventor) and his instruments and tools, then studied sculpture and classical music in college. Always, those two seemingly disparate worlds overlap and intertwine, perhaps unsurprisingly. Behind each instrument are builders’ hands. In my modest outdoor wood shop around the back of my studio, I started to build Plinko machines.

Plinko Board Austin Weber

In its most basic form, a Plinko machine is a near-vertical board studded with pegs and lined with guardrails. A small object, when dropped from the top into the machine, bounces downwards from peg to peg. Changing the backing, pegs, and dropped-objects reveals a wealth of possibilities. I toyed with gravel dropped through wide-spaced wooden pegs, ping-pong balls dropped through tight steel nails, tennis balls through dowel rods, beads, coffee-beans, longer, shorter, backed with thin ply, with two-by-fours, tinkering away and bringing the best combinations in front of a microphone. Steel nails, that was the thing. Steel nails on a 1.5 inch pine board.

Wide stereo spreads, narrow fields, condensers, dynamics—a second search continued inside the studio. And I wanted a little bit more variation. Each “Plinko” was too similar, governed by the constant 9.8m/s2 acceleration of earth’s gravity. I slowed down the samples. What would this Plinko sound like on the Moon? On Venus? I reversed them. Scrambled them. The sound was there, the sound was perfect, but I couldn’t escape the natural order of gravity. However random the sound of a Plinko might seem in the abstract, the outcome was intensely patterned—a contrast to Ben's chaotic internal workings. So, with the sound where I wanted, steel nails on 1.5” pine mic’d with a u87, I built a new, tiny Plinko that sat horizontally and allowed me to pluck each nail individually. It basically resembles a “Cow Tool” from The Far Side, but it sounds fantastic. I found my engineered chaos.

I remember calling Fernando and Jacob into the studio. The following eureka moment ranks among my most fulfilling. Jacob says the sound transported him back to the experience of acting Ben: I had captured that “animating energy, that impulse.” It is a true joy to be on the crew, to make that part that fits, those building blocks of the movie that bring the director’s vision to life, to stitch in the tapestry of intricate decisions, of thousands of small journeys like my Plinko day that create a work of art as rich and meaningful as Rent Free.