Disquiet

News on Quiet, Minimal and Otherwise Atmospheric Music on the Big and Small Screens: (1) As of my first viewing, I can’t say if there’s enough of a proper score in No Country for Old Men to fill a 7″ single, but what there is is evocative, as blissfully mundane and forebodingly arid as the movie’s setting. It was composed by Carter Burwell, regular colleague of the film’s directors, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, and includes guitarist David Torn among its musicians. … (2) It’s way early on The Road, the next film adaptation of a novel by Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country, but the movie is currently associated with director John Hillcoat, whose The Proposition was scored by Nick Cave (who also wrote it) and Warren Ellis (of Dirty Three), which is quite promising. … (3) Control, the bio-pic of Ian Curtis‘s brief life and briefer career with rock band Joy Division, features a score by New Order, which Joy Division became after Curtis’s 1980 suicide. Reportedly, Curtis watched director Werner Herzog‘s Stroszek (1977) that final night, which means some of the last music Curtis heard — in addition to Iggy Pop‘s The Idiot (also 1977), which he’s said also to have played that night — was by country guitarist Chet Atkins and blues harmonica player Sonny Terry, who contributed the score to Stroszek. … (4) Under-recognized ambient musician (and longtime sound designer) Kent Sparling is on The Princess of Nebraska by director Wayne Wang (whose Slam Dance had music by Mitchell Froom) and on Seventh Moon by Eduardo Sánchez (The Blair Witch Project, which was scored by Tony Cora, who’s also on Seventh Moon). … (5) David Holmes (Ocean’s Eleven, Out of Sight) is on director Aisling Walsh‘s The Daisy Chain. … (6) Clint Mansell (Requiem for a Dream) is on The Calling, from director Jan Dunn. … (7) The excellent, score-centric blog theplaylist.blogspot.com discusses Jonny (Radiohead) Greenwood‘s work on the new Paul Thomas Anderson film, There Will Be Blood, which had previously been associated with Jon Brion, who scored Anderson’s Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love; the piece quotes a recent Entertainment Weekly profile of Greenwood and focuses on the composer Krzysztof Penderecki‘s influence. … (8) Is there another credit more bittersweet for the movie-music professional than “Additional Music By”? … (Much of the above film-composer associations via imdb.com.)

By Marc Weidenbaum