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"They were saying all that Stanley Kubrick did during his life was be with his family, play chess, listen to jazz and direct movies," Jason "J." Swinscoe, the group's electronica brainchild, says over the phone from his London home.
"The Cinematic Orchestra being kind of jazz-based, the Guild heard some music and wanted us to do it.
'Accompaniment'
"It all sounded quite grand, but truth was we were just the musical accompaniment for the evening before the meal and the award ceremonies. We were just playing tracks from our first album and, um, scaring people."
Scaring people?
A not-so-unlikely response, given Swinscoe is a British DJ /composer/programmer/multi-instrumentalist who conceptualized the Cinematic Orchestra in the late 1990s as a group of musicians improvising over Swinscoe's sampled percussion and bass lines.
The cinematic angle, notably evident on the band's 1999 full-length debut Motion and last year's Remixes 1998-2000, stems from Swinscoe's love of great soundtrack composers such as the legendary Bernard Hermann (who scored, among others, Citizen Kane, Psycho, Fahrenheit 451 and Taxi Driver), while also melding '60s and '70s jazz, orchestral soundtracks, rhythm loops with live instrumentation.
The eclectic outfit -- a highlight at last year's Porto Film Festival in Portugal where they played an original score to the 1920s Russian film, The Man with the Movie Camera -- kicks off its latest North American tour at Babylon Tuesday night.
Swinscoe himself began in a live band -- Crabladder -- back in 1990 while studying Fine Art at Cardiff College in Britain.
"I was part of this three-piece group which was based on, and influenced by, a Canadian hardcore band called NoMeansNo," recalls Swinscoe, who played bass in Crabladder.
"And some people wound up scratching their heads going, 'How did you get from post-punk to jazz?' When it's done well, like the way NoMeansNo does it, you can use all sorts of time signatures ... I mean, there's less of the improvising in hardcore bands, but some of the forms and structures are not too far away from the jazz genre.
"At the time, I was writing parts of the tracks, but the lead guitarist was the real brains behind the outfit."
Following the release of their first single in 1993, musical differences brought the short life of Crabladder to a halt.
Fully aware of the burgeoning U.K. club scene, Swinscoe eventually picked up a computer and a sampler, then delved into his gigantic record collection with the idea of creating a hybrid of '60s and '70s modern jazz, film soundtracks from the same era and contemporary innovations of the 'sample' culture.
'Sketchpad'
"In dance music, there tends to be a lot of snobbery of finding that rare sample or drum break that no one else has used yet," says Swinscoe.
"Me, I use my record collection as a reference library as well as a sample library and sketchpad for new ideas."
Swinscoe then hit upon an innovative way of melding live instrumentation with samples. Snippets of piano, bass or other melody loops are sent to musicians, who play along to the grooves.
Once all the raw material is recorded, Swinscoe resamples and arranges the tracks as well as develops themes that appear during a particular session.
"It's been a slow process, and at times I felt it was taking up a lot of time with no gain from it," says Swinscoe. "But everyone enjoys playing -- at the end of the day, everyone enjoys that kind of release and outlet."