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Saturday’s screening of the documentary Parallax Sounds (part of this weekend’s Chicago International Movies & Music Festival) is billed as an “exclusive work-in-progress preview,” and I sure hope that means that the film’s Italian director, Augusto Contento, is far from finished—because as the film stands now, it’s a mess. From everything I’ve heard the documentary is nominally about Chicago’s underground music scene in the 90s and how it was affected by the city’s architecture, but if you were to walk into a screening blind it’s hard to see how you could figure that out. None of the subjects interviewed—Ken Vandermark, Steve Albini, Damon Locks, David Grubbs, Rick Wojcik, and Ian Williams—are identified until the closing credits. Even more puzzling, aside from a couple of grainy videos of Shellac, Gastr del Sol, and Storm & Stress, there’s not a trace of the music the film is supposed to be about.
