On Everson's The Golden Age of Fish, the soundtrack inparticular

"Fragmented" is, perhaps, the best descriptor for The Golden Age of Fish. Images of a protagonist speaking of cleaning products, catching footballs, and falling, presumably of murder, are the major visual refrains of Kevin Jerome Everson's The Age of Fish. Voice-overs tell viewers of the hazards of the cleaning products, the history of Cleveland shale, and a murder suicide case. The soundtrack is similarly fragmented: it clicks and hisses with technical failure, it hums and pulses with angst and tension, it swells and falls with sadness. In his introduction to the film Everson called the piece the experience of viewing a landscape from a distance.

Unlike the goals of most soundtracks, Everson's purposely draws the viewers attention to its own artifice, not allowing viewers into the world of the fragmented narrative. Everson seems to assume that the repetition of images, multiple film stocks, and other experimental strategies are not enough to keep the viewer from becoming immersed in the story, the place. The keep the distance of the viewer as his own childhood viewing Cleveland from a small, safe, town, he uses a musical score that eschews any song structures and utilizes little tonality. Just when a a recognizeable chord would make itself whole, full of longing, a sharp electronic pop of an amp cable being pulled would break it up and a new set of creaks and whistles would begin to build.

Other sequences would just use synchronous sound as the protagonist walks down a street. The recording device was tinny and harsh, so the city symphony of passing cars and construction work became an unbearable din of urban pollution and consumption.

Everson mentioned that wanted to shoot the Cleveland landscape as if it was, in and of itself, a suspect in the crimes the film's outline. His grainy rendering of billboards, storefronts, and alleyways certainly put the viewer into a place of suspicion toward the landscape. However, it is this tuneless, grating sound that invokes a certain righteous anger toward the content of these images.

Some sequences contain little or no soundtrack outside of a voiceover speaking about shale. This sterile, facutal reading over certain images fails to create any sense of peace with in the viewer (this viewer, specifically). Instead, geology becomes a bone of contention. Science itself is a suspect in a cosmic conspiracy against a Woman and her maniacal lover. When the soundtrack kicks back in with the disquieting noises the viewers are even more likely to suspect the city and its geology.