Formed in Boston in 1999 by guitarist Brendon Wood, Devil Music Ensemble explores all facets of music from rock to electronic, orchestral to folk, and improvisational to incidental. Devil Music Ensemble is a multi-media experience, performing both composed and improvised scores to silent films. While their studio recordings have garnered the accolades of both the Boston Phoenix and the Village Voice, their live scoring of classic and modern silent films has gained them an eclectic following from Boston to Bowling Green.

Employing standard and modified electric guitars in tandem with lap steel, Brendon Wood creates a dynamic canvas of sound on which electric violinist Jonah Rapino and drummer Tim Nylander layer sound alternately serene and scary. Rapino -member of the acclaimed, New Millenium String Ensemble- also handles keyboard duties (occasionally alongside Wood), using vintage analog synthesizers that sound far more modern than their electronic parts. Former Say ZuZu drummer Tim Nylander brings a machine like precision, garnered from many years of accompaniment in music theater to the project, laying down beats that anchor Devil Music Ensemble's sound safely outside of the waters of pretentiousness.

Devil Music Ensemble began their touring career with their live score to Robert Wiene's 1919 film "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" in movie theaters, museums, performing art centers, and colleges around the country. "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" is considered the most cherished film of German expressionism. As a horror film, it stands alongside Dreyer's Vampyr and Murnau's Nosferatu for its stunning visual embodiment of expressionist ideals. Devil Music Ensemble's score is both beautiful and extremely dynamic, bringing the characters and the film to life as if for the first time.

The DME's next project was scoring and presenting of a very unknown silent westen comedy gem called "Big Stakes", directed by Clifford S. Ellfelt and released in 1922. J.B. Warner stars as a Texas gentleman who falls for a Mexican girl and tries to win her from a dashing rival in a contest involving Mexican jumping beans. When his new love rejects him, he returns home just in time to save his blonde hometown girl from a Ku Klux Klan leader who questions her "purity." The film's somewhat liberal attitude toward race is in stark contrast to "A Birth of a Nation", and the exciting climax could have been intended as a subtle criticism of Griffith's landmark epic.

The next touring film project for the DME was F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1922). "Nosferatu", like "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and "Metropolis", descended from the same artistic wave of German cinema in the 1920's, is the definition itself of artistic film, where painting, architecture, literature, psychology, and politics meet in a work that gratifies both the eyes and the spirit. When creating the screenplay, Murnau relied heavily and without permission on Stoker's novel and attempted to disguise the characters by changing their names and geographical setting. The film premiered in 1922 but eventually, Florence Stoker with the aid of the British Incorporated Society of Authors succeeded in destroying the original negatives and most of the prints of "Nosferatu". Thankfully a few prints did survive.

With their new score for "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", the DME has done a 6.5 week U.S. tour and two seperate European tours. Directed by John S. Robertson, the1920's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has been described as the "first American horror film." Not the first but arguably the best, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is based upon Robert Louis Stevenson's famed novella "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and was brought to life by John Barrymore, widely regarded as the world's greatest actor at the time. Barrymore's interpretation remains the most shockingly energetic version of the role on film. At the time, Barrymore's transformation into the evil Mr. Hyde was considered shocking in its realism, and still today many aspects of this film that survive quite well, scenes in which one is permitted a glimpse into the power this film once had.

The DME's current scoring project is for one of the only remaining feature length martials arts film from China's silent era. Red Heroine (Hong Xia) was made at the height of the martial arts craze in 1920s Shanghai, and is a lively tale about the rise of a woman warrior that features the genre’s then-characteristic blend of pulp and mystical derring-do. DME will embark on a 4 week tour of the U.S. starting in September of 2008.

-"Le sang d'un poete" by Jean Cocteau 2001
-"Modern Times" by Charlie Chaplin 2002
-"Le Voyage Imaginaire" by Rene Claire MA 2002
"The First Films of the Lumiere Bros." 2003
- "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" by R.Weine 2003
- Surealist Films of ManRay 2003
-"Big Stakes" by Clifford S. Ellfelt 2004
-"Nosferatu" by F.W. Murnau 2005
-"Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde" 2006