Cinesonic
CD reviews
Column
No.1
published in The Wire No. 226, London, December 2002
Artist:
VARIOUS Title: EASY TEMPO É END TITLES Label/Cat#: EASY
TEMPO ET 936 CD
Birthed
during the mid-90s grooviness unleashed by Trip Hop revivalists
who blurred jazz, cocktails and cravats, the Easy Tempo
compilations of themes from Italian Soundtracks have stood
a few tests of time. Produced and supervised by Rocco Pandiani,
the Easy Tempo series now concludes with No.10, End Titles.
For those who have not encountered the series, this ending
could be the start of something truly enriching.
Italian
movie scores are possibly the only modernist take on what
in most other cultures has remained a turgid, high-art 19th
Century affair. There are many reasons which separate Italy
from this tradition. Key factors would include Italy's folk
and oral tradition of song; Italy's thorough technological
integration of its postwar film industry with its postwar
recording industry; and Italy's sheer delight in the excessive,
heightened, ornamental and pneumonic aspects of record production.
One can hear all of this on just about any track in the
Easy Tempo series, manifested as a stream of sono-musical
documents which make one realize how inclusive and rich
the Italian theme song tradition has been in its populist
cinema from the 40s through to the 80s.
The
opening track on End Titles functions as a signpost for
those whose ears might get lost in the superficialities
of these gaudy and glistening mini-musicales. Piero Umiliani's
"Cinque Bambole Per Una Luna D'Agosto" (Five Dolls In The
August Moon, directed by Mario Bava, 1971) is a 7'30" suite
which shimmers with a series of wavering tunings between
harps, sitars, saxes and upright pianos. Due to the privileging
of sonic novelty in much Italian song production from the
postwar period, "Cinque Bambola" perceptually flits between
being a hyper-baroque effusion and an overwhelming schizophrenic
exhibition. One main melody reappears in a number of tuned
guises, generating a sequence of shifts controlled by a
composer like Ulliami who understands the nuances of narrative
twists and turns through which music can drive a film. The
track - like so much of End Titles - is dynamic and active
in its denouement; it is a world away from the tired notion
of Ôambient scoring' which Italy has neither heard nor acknowledged.
Other
standout tracks include the gorgeously unfolding drama of
Armando Tovajoli's "Angola Adeus", plus an amazing live
recording for Italian TV of Ennio Morricone's "Metti Una
Sera Cena" conducted by fellow film composer Piero Piccioni
and featuring the glacial voice of Edda Dell'Orso. The breathing
quality of the latter's performance makes once realize the
importance of live conduction in so much Italian film music,
wherein composer, arranger and producer are more often integrated
than they are segregated. One might hear nothing but Ôretro'
affectations in the surface trickery and musical mimicry
of these tracks. But one could also hear this wealth of
material from another era and conclude that in film music,
the future never took place.
Artist:
VARIOUS Title: GO! CINEMANIA REEL 1 - PUNCH THE GUY Label/Cat#:
POLSTAR PSCR 5889 CD
Artist: VARIOUS Title: GO! CINEMANIA REEL 2 - YOUNG TURKS
Label/Cat#: POLSTAR PSCR 5890 CD
Artist: VARIOUS Title: GO! CINEMANIA REEL 3 - TAKE A WALK
ON THE PSYCHEDELIC SIDE Label/Cat#: POLSTAR PSCR 5899 CD
If
Italian film music is hard to contextualize beyond its cheesy
charm, grounding Japanese film music from the late 50s through
to the early 70s borders on the impossible. Fortunately,
we have some listening guides: the Cinemania series of soundtrack
compilations. Commenced in 1995, the series has recently
reached No.9. All nine are still available and look like
continuing still.
The
result of producer Kyoko Kitahara from Toho Music and Atsushi
Takaoka from Toho Music subsidiary label Polystar, the concept
of the Cinemania series is to spotlight the film subgenera
which make Japanese 60s cinema the most outrageous in the
world. (And believe me: that's an understatement.) The otaku-style
obssessiveness which characterizes the robust research behind
much Japanese cultural investigation is evident in the Cinemania
series. Each CD's selection is commissioned: Punch The Guy
by K-Taro Takanami; Young Turks by Comoesta Yaegashi; and
Take A Walk On The Psychedelic Side by Masayuki Kawakatsu
and Fujiki TDC. All CDs are presented as mock orijinaru
eru-pi covers and include a lift-out mini poster printed
on 60s-era waxy newsprint. It's tactile and very Japanese.
Let's touch the first three.
Punch
The Guy is based on pulp yakuza films from the late 60s,
the most famous being the Wolf series - Wolf Never Die,
Wolf Should Die, Hunting Wolves, etc. The CD wonderfully
captures the cinesonic feel of these films: roomy sounds
of combos playing at 3am to a lone couple dancing. Easily
misinterpreted as Ôbad jazz', careful listening of Punch
The Guy uncovers a musicological webbing which continually
contradicts its stylistic appearance. Saxophones play lines
normally articulated by a koto; female ballad-singing drips
over enka rhythms; a burst of early Commodores low-slung
funk erupts from nowhere; someone bursts through the subterranean
doors and freak-out fuzz envelops the space. For those wanting
a clearer reference, many of the tracks obliquely recall
Henry Mancini's faux-mulatto Hollylatin 1958 score for Orson
Welles' Touch Of Evil. Yet the mournful post-ronin collapse
of the wandering yakuza dislocated in Japan's 60s electric
boom reverberates through most of Punch's tracks: they sound
Hollywood but taste Tokyo.
Young
Turks exudes a Cramps-esque trash cinephilia wherein the
fake is glorified. 60s Japanese genre pictures revel in
unabashed mimicry; the proliferation of Ôbeatnik' movies
proves it. Often intended to evoke a free-beatnik spirit,
movies like Let's Go! Thunders, Tornado Kid, Cutie-Dolls
in Neon Town and (wait for it) Cutie-Dolls With Babygang
bizarrely mix cool posturing and sultry intonations into
mutated bongo burlesques whose excess defies purist categorization.
Again, focussed listening through this maze of references
and stylistic aberrations throws up some mutant gems, with
suitably gratuitous sex-kitten teasing, Les Baxter ornamentation,
scintillating electric organs and sporadic yelps of "Let's
Go!".
Take
A Walk On The Psychedelic Side clearly references the urban
cine-grit conjured by Edward Dymytrk's 1962 film Walk On
The Wild Side with its score by Elmer Bernstein. But the
mutation into Ôpsychedelic' aptly orients the listener to
the wholly psychotic bent of Japanese sex and violence movies
at the end of the 60s. Fuzz-wah lines slice through otherwise
conventional pulp crime-soaked arrangements. Track titles
lifted from the original cues give a sense of what's going
on: "Trip Rock", "Jet Screaming Machine", "Sympathy For
The Rebel", "Dirty Girlie", "Last Tattoo". The back cover
image of two Japanese guys conducting some bizarre mind-torture
experiment on a middle-aged American adds to the sensationalism
heard on all these tracks.
Artist:
ANGELO BADALAMENTI Title: THE STRAIGHT STORY Label/Cat#:
WINDHAM HILL 01934-11513-2 CD
Artist: VARIOUS Title: MULHOLLAND DRIVE Label/Cat#: MILAN
74321 89823 CD Windham Hill Records.
Walt
Disney Pictures. David Lynch. Such a triumvirate could only
be conjured in the mind of É well, David Lynch. The soundtrack
to The Straight Story is one of the most unique scores to
close the last century (coming in late 1999). The fact that
it might sound like nothing but a wash of Twin Peaks synthetics
belies both the irony and the seriousness connoted by the
serendipitous alignment with Lynch and the word Ôstraight'.
The
Straight Story was the first score to be majorly recorded
and wholly post-produced in David Lynch's own studio - Asymmetrical.
A world away from the suffocating black holes which constitute
the Hollywood film sound-post studio world, Lynch literally
knocked walls out off his own house in the Hollywood Hills
- the same house featured in Lost Highway. One of extremely
few directors who sound design their own films, Lynch's
passion for sound grew to such a degree that his studio
took over that house, in effect leading him to purchase
the house next door in which to live and work. The Straight
Story score, sound design and CD is thus an by-product of
the Ôhome studio recording' revolution which has been responsible
for infusing lateral technique and idiosyncratic strategies
into record production for the last quarter century.
Can
this be heard in The Straight Story? Yes. Badalamenti's
string arrangements have been engineered by John Neff and
mixed by Lynch with sonic sensitivity and psychological
acumen. They have created a complex shimmering diffusion
of orchestrality that replicates the wavering fidelity of
sound that afflicts the aged. Are they real strings or fake
strings? Raw or refined? Why sometimes one and not the other?
Or am I loosing my hearing? The Straight Story sails one
through these deep waters of doubt. Some tracks - like "Nostalgia"
and "Montage" - transform one's listening environment into
another dimension. A sonic penumbra wells up and coats one's
speakers like a dense veil of palpable Otherness. It's a
glorious nausea. The experience of floating through the
tracks absolutely refutes notions of continuity, stability,
causality. And as a David Lynch soundtrack, so it should.
Mulholland
Drive takes these techniques and interlopes them with a
song selection which allows psychology to thoroughly overwhelm
narrative continuity. Lynch and Badalamenti's co-composing
from the former's processing of the latter's recordings
of the Prague Symphonic Orchestra (which they have been
using on and off for many years); unlikely picks from Milt
Buckner, Willie Dixon and Linda Scott; and tracks from Lynch's
other collaborative project with John Neff (the Blue Bob
CD) all strike a deft balance between uncontrolled eclecticism
and deep-seated compulsion.
The
juxtaposition between two key tracks exemplify this. Badalamenti's
"Jitterbug" seems to be cast in the mold of a Hollywood-esque
revamp of heady 40s big band brass. But strange overtones
are rumbling just underneath key notes. The resonance of
the room is not quite right. Even the arrangement is slightly
askew. Nothing gives one cause to cite any so-called subversion
of the music the track quotes - but, again, it creates doubt.
The Badalamenti/Lynch track "Diner" strips everything away
to reveal a morbid patina of clinging room tone and liquefied
ambience into which one sinks. In accord with Mulholland
Drive's moebius twist narrative, the CD twirls itself around
one's head only to do the most scary thing: graciously let
go.
