THE DEAD DON’T STAY QUIET IN PHILADELPHIA

Main Remains | A Film by Abigail Bruley | Philadelphia, PA | 2026

By Riot + Reverie

All images courtesy of filmmaker Abigail Bruley Abigail Bruley’s strange trip through death, resentment and unfinished business finds its pulse in two very different corners of Philadelphia music: Mannequin Pussy’s Marisa Dabice and the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra.

Riot + Reverie doesn't spend much time at the movies. But every once in a while, a film wanders close enough to the music that it becomes our business.

Main Remains, the latest short from Philadelphia filmmaker Abigail Bruley, is one of those films.

On paper, its premise sounds like the beginning of a particularly strange night out: Main, a 39-year-old woman living with the effects of a brain injury, is struck by lightning and dies. Death, however, doesn't quite stick. She finds herself somewhere between here and whatever comes next, with 39 hours to settle some unfinished business. Her response isn't enlightenment. It's revenge.

That alone would be enough to get our attention. But look a little closer at the credits and Main Remains starts telling another story, one that runs directly through Philadelphia music.

There is Marisa Dabice, playing a starring role alongside Bruley. If the name isn't familiar, the band probably will be: Dabice fronts Mannequin Pussy, the Philadelphia band that has spent the past decade turning punk's raw materials into something considerably harder to pin down.

And then there is the music. It comes from the Sun Ra Arkestra.

If you're wondering how a Philadelphia punk singer and one of the strangest, most important institutions in American jazz ended up orbiting the same short film, welcome to Philadelphia.

FROM THE PUNK CLUB TO SATURN

The Sun Ra Arkestra requires a little explaining, although "explaining" Sun Ra has always been something of a losing proposition.

Sun Ra was a composer, keyboardist, bandleader, poet, philosopher and one of the foundational figures of what would eventually become known as Afrofuturism. He built an artistic universe in which experimental jazz, electronics, ancient Egypt, outer space, costumes, theater, mythology and Black identity could all occupy the same stage. The Arkestra wasn't simply his band. Its performances blurred the boundaries between concert, theater, ritual and spectacle.

And crucially for this story, Sun Ra made Philadelphia home.

In 1968, Sun Ra and members of the Arkestra settled into a rowhouse at 5626 Morton Street in Germantown. They lived there. Rehearsed there. Made music there. Sun Ra remained there until his death in 1993, and members of the Arkestra continued the work after him. The house was eventually added to the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places.

So when the Arkestra appears in the musical DNA of Main Remains, this isn't some piece of prestige jazz dropped onto an independent film to make everything feel appropriately weird. There's history attached to it.

There is also something wonderfully fitting about putting Sun Ra's musical universe inside a story where the ordinary rules of existence have stopped working.

Then, at the other end of Philadelphia's musical timeline, there's Dabice.

Her presence connects Main Remains to a different version of the same city: the sweaty rooms, punk bills and independent spaces that helped Mannequin Pussy grow from a DIY band into one of Philadelphia's most recognizable contemporary rock acts.

That's where Main Remains becomes particularly interesting for Riot + Reverie. Because these aren't really two separate Philadelphias.

They're decades apart, musically miles apart, and born from entirely different traditions, but there's a shared instinct underneath them: Make the strange thing anyway.

THE CITY IN THE WIRES

Bruley's film isn't ostensibly about Philadelphia music. It's about Main, a woman whose relationship with reality has never been particularly straightforward, suddenly confronting the ultimate reality and finding that even death comes with complications.

The film is the third installment in Bruley's larger Main series, following a character whose experience of the world is repeatedly misunderstood or overwritten by the people around her.

But the people Bruley brings into that world matter. So does the music she puts underneath it.

That's the story that pulled us toward Main Remains in the first place.

Philadelphia's musical history isn't a straight line. It runs through jazz and punk, basements and rowhouses, experimental art and loud guitars. Sometimes those histories exist decades apart. Sometimes they end up in the same movie.

And sometimes a music publication has to go to the movies.