Dean and Britta make the Most Beautiful music for Warhol

• Courtesy High Museum of Art
• Dean Wareham (left) and Britta Phillips

Dean Wareham admits that being asked to score 13 of Pop Art icon Andy Warhol’s screen tests was intimidating. In 2008, the Andy Warhol Museum and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust commissioned Wareham and his wife Britta Phillips, aka indie pop duo Dean and Britta, to put music to 13 of Warhol’s “stillies” featuring Factory regulars such as Dennis Hopper, Lou Reed, and Edie Sedgwick, for the 2008 Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts. The result is The 13 Most Beautiful… Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, a guitar-and-keyboard soundtrack of original works created specifically for the short films, save a few older Dean & Britta songs, a cover of Reed’s “I’m Not a Young Man Anymore” for the Velvet Underground frontman and a Bob Dylan cover (“I’ll Keep it With Mine”) for Nico. The project led to the first DVD release of Warhol’s works. Dean and Britta come to Atlanta to perform The 13 Most Beautiful… at Symphony Hall as part of the High’s Culture Shock event series. The exhibit Picasso to Warhol: 14 Modern Masters remains on view at the High through April 29.

Would you explain Warhol’s screen test films?
Warhol made 472 of these films between 1964 and 1966. They are short, silent, black-and-white portraits. Before he was doing this he was doing photo booth portraits, which he called “stillies,” so this kind of grew out of that – it was the next step when he bought a Bolex and decided that he was moving into making film. He didn’t really know how to edit film I guess; he didn’t have to edit film. He’d just load a reel of film, which is about three minutes in length, and he would sit someone against a white background or a black background and just let the film roll and tell them to stare straight into the camera and do as little as possible. Then he would play these films back at a slower speed, at a silent film speed instead of the sound film speed, so they’re all kind of stretched out. So, they play back and they were just over four minutes each and that’s what kind of gives them a slightly spooky quality. If you slow down someone’s face you can kind of see things flicker across them that you really wouldn’t otherwise notice. The first part of our assignment was to pick 13 of these films.

What drew you to these 13?
We started reading about the Factory in this period; it’s called the Silver Factory. It was the one that was painted silver and it was a former hat factory on East 47th Street. After this period he moved to Union Square, which is where everything changed. It’s where he got shot. I know a little bit about Warhol and the Velvet Underground and the people that were around them, but I didn’t really know much about them at all until I started researching this and the more we learned the more we decided to focus on the people that were there everyday, like Billy Name who was Warhol’s assistant and even Dennis Hopper who was an important early champion of Warhol’s work when he went out to the West Coast. This is at a point where Warhol wasn’t selling anything at all and Dennis Hopper was blacklisted from Hollywood, he wasn’t doing much at all either – this was before Easy Rider — he was blacklisted for the first time because he was too difficult to work with, I think. Hopper was one of the first people to buy a soup can painting.