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Press release
Philip Brophy has long been critical of the John Williams-style film score which pounds audiences with symphonic bombast. Not that there's anything particularly wrong with orchestras (not to forget that Williams has done some great film scores), but Philip goes more for the electric twang of Morricone's Once Upon A Time In The West, the subsonic pulsing of John Carpenter's Escape Fro New York and the richly syncopated rhythm tracks of Isaac Hayes' Truck Turner .Why do audiences presume that orchestras are 'the right thing' for film music? What is it about the majesty of a full symphony that makes people think they're getting quality for their movie dollar? Philip doesn't have the answers to those perplexing questions, but in the process of pondering such things he chanced upon a strange project: to take some movie music scores and totally pervert and decimate them into shiny new objects of weird noise. In his search for fragments of orchestral fragments which he could sample and digitally manipulate beyond recognition, Philip found that the most suitable were sci-fi, horror and fantasy scores - which traditionally have reworked conventions established by avantgarde composers like Stravinsky, Schoenbeg, Webern, Bartok, Varese, Penderecki and Ligeti.
To his amazement, Philip also found that every score he had picked out from his vast record collection was by Jerry Goldsmith. Thus, the project took a definite shape: he focused exclusively on Goldsmith's scores from the late 70s to early 80s, and constructed strange ambient pieces, each shaped from distorted milliseconds of the scores to Coma, Omen, Outland, Alien, Swarm and Poltergeist. The result? A ride you won't get at Movieworld: The Cavern of Deep Tones.
Original programme note from 1999
"A cavern sits at the end of the graveyard of the 20th century. Just to the right are lined the remains of many a dead composer. Their graves gape open; their dry skeletons still sparkling under a silvery full moon. Endless wind from the netherlands creeps across the undulating plains and whistles through the bones of the avant garde. The sound is pushed haltingly into the cavern, producing a series of deep tones. I sit in a small alcove some way into the cavern, the LEDs on my digital workstation pulsing up and down in response to these surges of sound. Strange music appears to take shape - born of a robust atonality but infected by a constrictive harmony. I am near to deciphering this music as I process it again and again. I know the names belong to Bartok, Penderecki, Stravinsky, Webern, Ligeti - but why does my computer flash up the same name again and again: Jerry Goldsmith. And why do horror movies spring so readily to mind?"
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