| Melali: The Drifter Sessions |
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The Drifter, Taylor Steele’s project showing Rob Machado’s Indo adventures, successfully released last year, generated a great amount of surfing footage in perfect waves, like only Indo delivers. These surf sessions featuring Rob Machado and other surfers, have been gathered in Melali, a film halfway between a making of and a complement to The Drifter. Melali returns to the fundamentals of surf cinematography by focusing on the surfing experience, the artful relationship between man and surf, and the sharing of this experience with good friends. Melali - a two-disc set contains two versions of the 35-minute surf film, an audio CD of the original score, and a short film documenting the recording of the soundtrack. Set to an original score written by Jon Swift, Todd Hannigan, Fernando Apodaca, and Machado (The Melali Sessions Band), the music complements the imagery of the synergy born from long-standing camaraderie. “When we premiered The Drifter across the country, the best part of the night was the live improvisation with the band to the surf bonus footage,” Machado says. “That inspired us to make another movie with the unreleased surf footage and record some music as the score.” Swift, a fellow surfer and Machado’s friend of 25 years, led the intense creative push by this team of accomplished musicians, who recorded the score in a barn in rural southern California. The result is a diverse mix of musical compositions ranging from simple ballads to full band improvisations that captures a broad spectrum of moods tailored to the soulful and dynamic surfing.
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