Cinesonic
CD reviews
Column
No.3
published in The Wire No. 249, London, October 2004
Artist:
JOE HISAISHI
Title: HANNA BI
Label/Cat#: POLYDOR POCH-1672
Title: ANNO NATSU, ICHIBAN SHIZUKANA UMI (A SCENE AT THE
SEA)
Label/Cat#: WONDERLAND WRCT-1002
Title: DOLLS
Label/Cat#: UNIVERSAL J UPCH-1191
While
recent American crime films attempt to bludgeon one with
violence (some quite masterly) Japanese crime cinema has always been intent on
cutting deep. It’s a hammer
versus sword thing. Contemporary revisions of the tradition
are best exemplified by the yakuza films by Kitano ‘Beat’
Takashi. The unexpected timing of his characters’
explosions of violence are as unsettling as the acts themselves.
Yet Takashi films aren’t about violence: they are
about regret. Composer Joe Hisaishi’s compositional
tack is as much about voicing Takashi’s sense of ‘ill-timing’
as it is about emotional states. Shifting from very Anglophile
neo-minimalism to an almost fetid fertility in its pulped
paraphrasing of the sweeter end of the spectralist vogue,
Hanna-Bi’s (1998) musical iconography to many listeners
will appear bland, suffocating even. But this is muzak peculiar
to modern Japan’s air-conditioned zones of existential
angst. With Takashi, Hisaishi renders the cinema theatre
as sterile as the confines of the screen’s bitter
and disengaged yakuza, giving us the muzak of their minds.
Hisaishi’s first collaboration with Takahashi has
the trademarks he developed for their proceeding films.
A Scene At The Sea (1991) is an unnervingly close study
of the mystery that clouds the murky motivations behind
those who commit suicide – in this case, a near-dysfunctional
teen who becomes obsessed with surfing. The waves aren’t
that big in Japan, so there’s no epic swelling
in either film or score. The story devolves into a
deflation of Melville’s Moby Dick, here ending
with simply the disappearance of the young surfer.
His erasure is subtly portrayed by Hisaishi’s
score (recently re-released). With delicate and tasteful
pattering of marimbas, upper register piano octaves,
nylon sting guitar plinks and real and synthetic feminine
wordless-vox, there is always a sense that the music
is its own ghost: lightly being stated with a knowingness
that it must eventually fade. Satie’s
Gymnopedies are obliquely quoted elsewhere – but
more for their disconnected tonal progression as per Satie’s
intention than for the presumed lusciousness of their
somnambulistic waltz figures. The right-but-wrong harmonic
logic generates
‘beautiful music’ yet Hisaishi is here synchronising
to the random connections made between the film’s
tragic characters. And those Fairlight CMI strings are
employed for their fakeness in a way that is quintessentially
Japanese. All up, it’s a surf movie with no surf,
with gorgeous no-surf movie music.
When Beat Takashi adapted a famous play from the bunraku
puppet theatre of his hometown Osaka, his core theme of
regret came to the fore in an unbridled outpouring of cinematic
poetry. After a no-show wedding ceremony sends a woman
into catatonia, the groom undertakes to redress his mistake
and spend his life tied to her by the traditional ‘beggar’s
bond’ of thick red rope. The film then traces their
journey across Japan over the four seasons. The film’s
allegorical structure is profoundly traditional, and certainly
devoid of the yakuza pyrotechnics expected of Takahashi.
However Dolls (2001) is the purest cinematic visualisation
of exactly what Hisaishi’s music had been doing for
Takashi’s preceding films: weighing the present of
music’s performative aura with the past of its harmonic
baggage. Western/European film scoring has ultimately been
fixated on its present-tense synchronisation to onscreen
drama; Hisaishi’s scores are more about music’s
exclusion from image dictates. Specifically, his metronomic
orchestrations musically illustrate the inner emptiness
of the forlorn lovers’ transformation into ‘dolls’
as they plod their way through pink sakura blossoms and
translucent white snow. Drained of humanism but brimful
of the sad residue of what it once felt like to be human,
these tragic lovers are Hisaishi’s score remembered.
Artist: ENNIO MORRICONE
Title: IL DIAVOLO NEL CERVELLO
Label/Cat#: DAGORED RED 135-2
Title: IL SERPENTE
Label/Cat#: DAGORED RED 142-2
Title: ECCO HOMO I SOPRAVVISSUTI
Label/Cat#: DAGORED RED 141-2
The sprawling ties between the thriller, giallo and psycho
movies in Italy throughout the 60s and 70s form a wonderfully
saturated era where every whodunit cliché is contorted
into new and ungainly spasms. Far from a dumb mainstream
cinema, it was a perverse and playful cinema. Music played
a big role in building the atmosphere to these cinematic
games. Morricone’s score to Sergio Sollima’s
Il Diavolo Nel Cervello (aka Devil In The Brain, 1971) provides
a snapshot of this generic gameplay. True to the modular
format of these whodunits, Morricone takes a brace of themes
and then with appropriate perversity ties them into knotted
configurations, each overlaid on the other. Listening to
the whole CD, one is left giddy from these variations and
their unending malleability. Based on the opening yet incomplete
phrase of Beethoven’s Fur Elise, Morricone’s
undying inventiveness accelerates the matricular possibilities
of its harmonic patterning into terrains unimagined by the
arch romantic minimalism which would be deemed postmodern
a decade later. From rich permutations of horns, strings,
harpsichord, piano and Edda Dell’orso, to splayed
and exhausted overtones and upper-harmonics ghosting the
recognisable motifs, Morricone does orchestral math at
its best.
Morricone’s score to Henri Verneuil’s Il Serpente
(aka Night Flight To Moscow, 1973) is a mixed bag: some
lush organ and orchestra themes redolent with that Vatican
church ambience; some wild freakout wah-wah rock with girl
boogaloo chorus; plus the garish addition of some small-town
brass marching tunes. But it is the clutch of dripping and
shivering atonal sketches of the second half of the CD that
link this score to Morricone’s experimental work with
Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuovo Consonanza Musica. Expanded
bowed and percussive techniques are combined with some brutishly
effective ring-modulation processing, suggesting what Stockhausen
might have done if he had scored a crime thriller. Still,
Morricone’s voguish appropriation of these improvisatory
gestures creates some thoroughly engaging soundscapes sophisticated
in both their arrangement and stereo spatialization, especially
in his distinctive fusion of synth tones, amplifier effects,
triangles, bowed cymbals.
The inimitable Edda Dell’orso is the first thing you
hear in Morricone’s score t Bruno A. Gaburro’s
Ecco Homo – I Spravvissuti (Behold This Man, 1969).
She murmurs a quasi-Grecian semitonal incantation which
is picked up and draped around her corpus by a confined
ensemble of flute, viola, harp, marimba, vibes and percussion.
Her siren voice floats across the CD, sometimes in close
breathy relief, other times in echoic displacement. The
instruments stretch her, mimic her, replace her, voice her
– in uncanny replay of the film’s psychologically
tense sexual drama as three men are captivated by a woman
in a remote seaside village. The Mediterranean primitivism
connoted in the score is less a statement on expanded performance
and more Morricone’s own portrait of the sexual revolution
in this 1969 recording. A beautiful recording of a tersely
erotic work.
Artist: JOHN CARPENTER
Title: VAMPIRES
Label/Cat#: MILAN 73138-35851-2
Title: GHOSTS OF MARS
Label/Cat#: VARESE SARABENDE 302 066 286 2
John Carpenter’s score for his own film Vampires
(1998) may not seem outré by any measure – but
this is deliberately so. In his revisiting of the vampire
genre (with greater fidelity and respect than most have
accorded it in the past few decades), his score roots
the musical milieu of the film into a Californian/Tex-Mex
Latino tradition of this decidedly European archetype.
Carpenter creates a musicological map for the new-American
terrain of the vampire, and thus soundscapes the dry mortal
desert of the vampire’s reign in place of his dark
and brooding mystical essence. Furthermore, Carpenter
takes Jack Nitzsche’s
distinctive model of forming a band to record the score
sessions, and creates the Texas Toad Lickers for half
of the score. The line-up includes the core backing section
of Booker T and the MGs: Donald Dunn and Steve Cropper.
A Stax texture pervades the film in its own mystical way,
generating a slow Texan blues boogie which unexpectedly
symbolises the hard-but-cool drudgery with which the gang
of humans fight the dark forces. It might sound like a
Jim Beam ad, but contextualized within the film, it’s
strong stuff.
A casual netsearch suggests Carpenter’s music is perceived
as middling and not clearly defined for those who like their
music (and scores) to be emblazoned with clear affiliations.
But Carpenter has always merged sensibilities, forms and
styles in both his genre movies and their scores. Most importantly,
these mergers occur between screen and score – something
a music review alone can miss. Ghosts of Mars (2001) with
ghosts is done with typical Carpenter conviction. The score
is Carpenter again assembling a musical line-up to characterise
the film: he selects musicians as a director would choose
actors. With Anthrax as his backing band and featuring guitar
solos by Steve Vai and Buckethead, Carpenter provides synth-pad
drones behind them. It might not be pure metal but it’s
a kick-arse score to a no-bullshit movie, born of a singular
audiovision, and not concocted over lunch between an A&R
man and a ‘music supervisor’. The difference
here is that this is a score composed specifically for
the film, and well-attuned to its sensibilities. Cinema
and film music are mongrel mulatto beings: the canny scores
are those who know this and experiment with that knowledge.
Artist: ONOGAWA HIROYUKI
Title: ELECTRIC DRAGON 80,000V
Label/Cat#: RAMBLING RECORDS RBCE-3002
Title: GOJOE
Label/Cat#: AVEX TRAX AVCD-11875
The loudest deafest dumbest noise-score has to be Onogawa
Hiroyuki’s freak-out to Sogo Ishii’s Electric
Dragon 80,000V (2002). The film details an ongoing battle
between two beings literally addicted to electricity, including
one who generates megatronic feedback wails through Marshall
stacks lining his bedroom wall. For once, a film’s
visual pyrotechnics are forcefully welded to its score.
The screaming history and histrionics of guitar noise are
compressed into slabs which sonically convey the electrified
adrenaline surging through these two supermen. Music cues?
No – just pure eruptions of energy in place of a recognisable
score. Specific to the Japanese context, Electric Dragon
80,000V is a homage to early 60s kid’s TV shows, filmed
in black and white and on location in Japan’s outer
suburban wastelands – still visually scarred by WWII
bombing and the emergent signs of urban renewal. These shows
are quaint but amazing – like 40s Italian neo-realism
meets 30s Flash Gordon serials – and feature bizarre
musique concrete effects to energise the low-budget visual
effects. Fondly remembering Japan’s own B-Grade legacy
while decimating any sense of warm nostalgia, Onogawa Hiroyuki’s
‘score-core’ perfectly represents the childlike
hysteria for superpower and blasts it loudly into the film.
Sogo Ishii’s Gojoe (2000) is his 5th collaboration
with composer Hiroyuki Onogawa. In contrast to the biting
brute noise of Electric Dragon 80,000V, Gojoe is an epic
‘trans-world’ score for a mystical historical
lore – Asian-style. Using his own group Mach 1.67,
Onogawa works with a family of traditional Indian singers
and tabla players. Sounds like an obvious ethnographic recipe,
but Onogawa’s direction of this merger reverberates
with the near-deafening majesty of the film’s torrid
and sordid battles for power between a Buddhist monk, a
grave-robber, a clan head and a vengeful master swordsman.
Due to the score’s taiko drum detonations and searing
metallic percussive events and tonings, the music casts
these figures as gigantic bronze statues of godly proportion.
It’s the Asiatic version of Teutonic and Vulcanite
powerheads of Western lore, appropriately and evocatively
signified through the Indian/Japanese instrumentation and
modal improvisation. The orchestration also ably reflects
the social and psychological profile of the 4 warring figures
(scrapping metal for the grave-robber, court music flute
for the lords, etc.). A beautiful stereofield imaging adds
to the massive expansiveness of the music, making a CD
that seeks to be played loudly.
Artist: ZHAO JIPING
Title: TEMPTRESS MOON
Label/Cat#: ROCK RECORDS (TAIWAN) CHD-019
Zhao Jiping’s 5th collaboration with Chinese director
Chen Kaige, Temptress Moon (1996) is his most sensual symphonic
suite. Following the film’s intermeshing of personal
sexuality with changing social politics in Shanghai during
its own ‘roaring 20s’, Jiping’s score
combines large scale orchestral expansiveness with heightened
solo instrumentation. The erotic breathiness of the erhu,
bawu and p’i-p’a are exploited with a mix of
reserve and intoxication, replicating the shifts from mannered
decorum to heady enrapture which engulf the film’s
central trio of characters. More than a play with surface
detail and sexual metaphors, Jiping’s compositional
technique captures the numerous isolated moments of socio-sexual
conflict in Chen Kaige’s epic story and forms them
into a dense network of discrete musical gestures. Totalling
52 cues, the resulting central suite generates a peculiarly
halting momentum, as each shiver of graceful tonality if
exhaled, followed by a silent inhale. An organic rhythm
develops which functions to evoke the palpable mood of the
film with remarkable vibrancy.
Artist:
THOMAS BANGALTER
Title: IRREVERSIBLE
Label/Cat#: ROULE MUSIC 376-0006-826-0118
If you’ve seen Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible (2002)
you may find it hard to remember Thomas Bangalter’s
music. But when you hear the music after seeing the movie,
it’s likely you will find it hard to not remember
the film’s images. Possibly the most savage piece
of cinema in film history (no need to take my word for it
– watch it and see), Noe’s extended agenda to
scar the viewer in the act of viewing has always been cogniscent
of the role sound and music play in such strategies. In
Irreversible’s decimation of the rape-revenge subgenre,
he has solicited a score from Bangalter that acts like an
ungiving and unforgiving sonic spatialisation of Noe’s
brute world. A lesser director would have welcomed a dark
brooding reverberant industrial noise-scape. Noe and Bangalter
wisely leave that for PS2 games and Hollywood films derived
from comics, and instead use club music of high House order
French style to forge an unstoppable din. The music’s
forceful niceness perfectly matches the sheer indifference
with which Noe’s long-take camera gazes unflinchingly
at its acts of violence and retribution. Irreversibly.
Artist:
JON BRION
Title: MAGNOLIA
Label/Cat#: REPRISE 9-47696-2
Jon Brion’s first major score was for P.T. Anderson’s
Magnolia (1999). Released as a separate score CD to the
more readily available ‘song score’ by Aimee
Mann (itself a complex and beguiling collection of songs
largely co-produced by Brion), Magnolia is an astounding
work. A slight listen might mark the music as falling somewhere
in the lushness which has characterised cinema’s appropriation
of the softer streams of minimalism. A sharper consideration
should make apparent Brion’s music bears no lineage
to the twee gentility afforded by cinema’s embrace
of contemporary chamber music. The perversely unironic lushness
of Brion is akin to the string arrangements typical of other
west coast pop arrangers like Jack Nitzsche, Van Dyke Parks
and Brian Wilson: all operate openly in the vulgar domain
of pop, but do so with an ambiguous genuineness that captivates
despite the obviousness of their harmonic statement. With
bold distinction and emotional conviction, Brion’s
score is less about anything apparent onscreen in Anderson’s
emotional flora of contemporary breakdowns, and more about
the psychological bio-rhythms which pulsate fatalistically
as people harm those they love. A score with deep dramaturgical
energy.
Artist:
KENJI KAWAI
Title: AVALON
Label/Cat#: MEDIA FACTORY ZMCZ-1171
In contrast to his more pan-Asiatic toned scores for anime,
Kenji Kawai’s high-European orchestral score matches
Mamoru Oshii’s shift from anime to live action in
Avalon (2001). For a westerner, possibly the hardest act
of listening is when the East goes West: one immediately
thinks something is too reduced in the referencing and too
skeletal in the tonality. This score certainly took me a
while to find a perspective to best appreciate Kawai’s
ingestion of the darker romantic chorales associated with
Europe’s Eastern Block. But once found, a new sonic
world opens up as the grandeur of the orchestra and choir
of the Warsaw Philharmonic is musically tailored to suit
Japanese sense. A gorgeous recording which intensifies the
purely sonic sensation of orchestral rumbling combined with
a hyper-soprano solo by Elizibeta Towarnicka convey a sense
