Lambchop and filmmaker Bill Morrison present The Dockworker’s Dream

Today, Nashville, TN based band, Lambchop and filmmaker Bill Morrison share The Dockworker’s Dream, a film collaboration soundtracked by “The Hustle” from the band’s forthcoming album FLOTUS. Like nearly all of Morrison’s work, The Dockworker’s Dream is constructed entirely from archival footage—specifically, material collected at Cinemateca Portuguesa, with music co-written by Ryan Norris and Kurt Wagner. The film premieres online at NPR Music where Bob Boilen writes, "Find eighteen minutes out of your day and take this journey. The faces, the landscape and even the hunt, from that not-too-distant past, offer perspective on who we are and how we've changed."


Watch The Dockworker’s Dream now;



Written to accompany and inspire Morrison’s film constructed from archival footage of decaying film brought back to cinematic life, “The Hustle” seamlessly shifts between movements, a foundation suggestive of krautrock and early electronic music, gorgeously ornamented with perfectly placed piano and horns. Wagner writes, “I think both Bill and I understand the power of things being less than black-and-white when it comes to narrative in black-and-white films. He is most poetic in his ability to edit such specific archival images into something moving and lasting. In some ways, my method is the same in that the things I write about are rarely fictitious. Just notes taken from life woven into song.”

Morrison shares the catalyst for the collaboration;  "I’d been following Lambchop since the mid-1990s and was thrilled to meet Kurt, and to hang out with him. Mario Micaelo, director of the Portuguese film festival Curtas Vila do Conde, approached us one night with the idea of our doing a collaboration for Curtas 2015, and we both agreed. During the summer of 2014, Mario and I visited the Cinemateca Portuguesa, where I selected the source material for The Dockworker’s Dream. Once we had the material in hand, Kurt and I exchanged edits to create the film.

The Dockworker’s Dream developed from the idea that the archive is a port of call, a place where goods are loaded and unloaded and held until a dockworker carries them off. In some ways, the imagery is a metaphor for our process. As a film researcher and editor, I find myself seeking out hidden or elusive film material. In the film, there is the voyage, the expedition—and the hunt: we hunt these rare films in order to bring them back alive so that they can live, for awhile longer, on the screen.

FLOTUS will be released on November 4 via Merge Records/ADA