This is Noise Pop
A decade-long documentary project celebrating the San Francisco indie music scene. Featured bands including Death Cab for Cutie, Modest Mouse, and The National. Named one of Rolling Stone's 'Seven Best New Music Documentaries.'
Every city has a moment when its music scene coheres into something greater than the sum of its bands. For San Francisco in the early 2000s, that moment revolved around the Noise Pop festival and the constellation of artists who orbited it: Death Cab for Cutie, Modest Mouse, Spoon, The National, and dozens of others who were quietly defining the sound of a generation.
The documentary began in 2001, not as a deliberate project but as an instinct. Having moved to San Francisco in 1996, arriving into a culture that valued independence over commerce, KQED over MTV, the local over the corporate, it felt urgent to record what was happening before the moment passed. Nobody else seemed to be filming. The film was edited by Tony Saxe, whose talent for finding the emotional through-line in hours of raw footage proved indispensable.
The project took ten years to complete. It was never a full-time endeavor; it ran alongside everything else, Sierra Club work, Act Now Productions, the Saatchi & Saatchi years. The camera came out whenever the scene beckoned, which was often enough. The accumulation of footage over a decade gave the film something that a quicker production could not have achieved: the long view. You see bands before fame found them and after. You see venues that became legendary and some that simply closed. You see the relationships that sustained a community over time.