Circus of Great Failures

Circus of Great Failures is a four-minute animated film by the Turkish artist İrem Nalça, released in 2020, for which I composed the score.

Nalça’s animation is a parade of small catastrophes — a tightrope walker who keeps falling, a lion who will not roar, a ringmaster whose hat grows until it covers him — drawn with a tenderness that makes each failure feel like an achievement. The music follows suit. It is a circus band reduced to its wrong notes: a wheezing harmonium, a drum that is always slightly late, a trumpet line (my own voice, processed) that reaches for the fanfare and cracks. Each act gets its own little tune, and each tune fails on cue, and the whole thing is held together by a waltz that is, by the end, the only thing still standing.

I am fond of this one. Failure, done with enough care, is a kind of circus act.