Though he’s most often associated with Memphis, Panther Burns frontman Tav Falco grew up in rural Arkansas, out in the country between Gurdon and Whelen Springs. Falco has announced that he’ll be releasing a new album, “Command Performance,” in February, and a photography book, “Tav Falco’s Wild & Exotic World Of Musical Obscurities,” as well, but he’s also just premiered his new feature film, an Expressionist epic called “Urania Descending,” that he says was inspired by Fritz Lang and set in both Little Rock and Vienna.
He discusses the film in detail in a new interview with The Quietus:
I thought, it’s going to be an intrigue, and it’s going to take place in America and Vienna. It can’t be just an ordinary intrigue, it has to have a poetic aspect. I thought, look at the muses and look at the muse Urania, the muse of the heavens, the muse of the stars and celestial movements, and of her avatar as she comes to Earth. She has not been exploited and mined so deeply in the literature of the world. Urania comes to Earth in the most unlikely form of a disaffected young American woman in the southern region of America on the Arkansas river in Little Rock.
And in another recent interview. with Louder Than War:
These days in America, you have to dig to find something interesting. Even the cosy neighbourhoods, the small town America is drying up. The town where I grew up in Arkansas, there are no more cars on the street, it’s almost a ghost town, the cinema’s been closed for years, the train doesn’t stop there anymore, it looks like the remotest part of Hungary. It depresses me.