The latest album from BLARF—the genre-warping musical project of Eric André—has officially arrived. Titled Film Scores for Films That Don’t Exist, the record is out now via Stones Throw Records, following two sold-out orchestral performances at Zipper Hall in Los Angeles, where Eric André stepped into the role of conductor, leading a full live ensemble through the project.
When BLARF first emerged with the 2019 debut Cease and Desist, the reaction was equal parts confusion and fascination. Built on chaotic plunderphonics and dense sample layering, the project blurred the line between satire and serious experimentation. As Pitchfork noted at the time, “The frenetic, sample-heavy album from Eric André’s clown alter-ego is hard to take seriously—which is probably the point.”
But with Film Scores for Films That Don’t Exist, that ambiguity evolves into something more deliberate. The clown persona fades into the background as Eric André pivots toward a sprawling, cinematic vision—one that trades sample-heavy absurdity for orchestral scale while still retaining his signature unpredictability.
The album plays like a surreal collision of worlds. Imagine the widescreen drama of Ennio Morricone’s score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly filtered through pure chaos—equal parts symphony and sensory overload. There are echoes of Vangelis’ Blade Runner score, but they’re constantly disrupted, bent, and reassembled into something that feels both reverent and irreverent at once. It’s outsider art at full volume, where classical composition meets performance art and noise-driven experimentation.
That tension between homage and provocation runs throughout the project. When Eric André smashes and burns a piano, it raises a familiar question: is it parody, or is it part of a lineage that includes avant-garde figures like Annea Lockwood and Yōsuke Yamashita? The answer, as with much of BLARF’s output, seems intentionally unresolved.
Beneath the spectacle, however, sits a deeply considered musical foundation. A graduate of Berklee College of Music, where he studied upright bass, Eric André approaches the album with a composer’s discipline as much as a performer’s instinct. Film Scores for Films That Don’t Exist was recorded with full orchestras in Los Angeles and Budapest, alongside co-writer and co-producer Prateek Rajagopal, bringing a level of scale and precision that contrasts sharply with its anarchic surface.
The result is an album that resists easy categorization—cinematic yet chaotic, humorous yet technically rigorous. With Film Scores for Films That Don’t Exist, BLARF expands beyond its origins into something more ambitious: a project that challenges the boundaries between composition, performance, and absurdity, while still embracing the unpredictability that defined it from the start.
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