New York Times movie critic Manohla Dargis on Boarding Gate, the new film from director Olivier Assayas (Demonlover, Clean, Paris Je T’aime):
I was again struck by how he uses music to amplify reality, almost as if he were inviting you to listen to the songs playing in other people’s heads. His use of Brian Eno […]
Romanian director Cristian Mungiu on the absence of music in his recent film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days:
“I don’t create emotion with music or closeups, and I don’t make the rhythm from the editing.”
The film has no score, save for a song that plays during the end credits (npr.org).
What I’ve been most focused on, listening-wise, this past week:
(1) White Noise, Yoga Heat: The CD showed up in the mail late last year, and on first appearance it seemed like a prank: a collection of four lengthy, meditative drones attributed to Lou Reed, of the Velvet Underground, and released on a small record label. […]
From composer Edward Artemiev’s notebook as he worked on the score to director Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, released in 1972:
The characters of the film hear (or are trying to hear) sounds either similar to terrestrial ones, or sounds which are kinds of little cells or islands remaining from the Earth which they manage to identify […]
Re-uploaded another batch of past “essays/reports” I wrote, plus one interview I did, dating back to 1994. Here they are, in roughly chronological order:
“Good Neighbors” (1994): How rock music and classical music face similar creative obstacles — and how so-called “crossover” projects aim for a mirage of a middle ground. What, for example, does […]
Cut to the chase, the clock’s ticking on 2007 as I type this. That previous sentence is intended to provide an alibi: making note of the circumstances under which a “best of” list is produced gives me an out down the road, when I might change my mind. In any case, this year’s “best of” […]
Quick News, Links, Bits: (1) Ike Turner, the rock’n’soul legend who will forever be remembered as Tina Turner’s abusive husband, passed away earlier this week (November 5, 1931 – December 12, 2007). I’ll never forget standing in the refurbished Sun Studio in Memphis, Tennessee, and being told the story of the chance damage to a […]
I’ve uploaded five more of the backdated interviews, from 2002 through 2003: Canadian composer Benoît Charest, on his score for the film Les Triplettes de Belleville; composer Elise Kermani, on revisiting “retro” multimedia performance and remixing Vivaldi; London-based Thorsten Sideboard, online-music mogul; Japan’s premiere turntablist, DJ Krush, on his seventh full-length album, The Message at […]
News on Quiet, Minimal and Otherwise Atmospheric Music on the Big and Small Screens: (1) It isn’t yet listed in imdb.com, but according to Movies That Rock (Condé Nast magazine supplement this winter), Gustavo Santaolalla (Babel, The Motorcycle Diaries) is scoring I Come with the Rain by Scent of Green Papaya director Anh Hung Tran. […]
Everything about No Country for Old Men, the new Joel and Ethan Coen movie, is, in a word, stark: the landscape, the atmosphere, the violence, the faces, the performances. It’s not that the film has shed any vestige of filigree; it’s that there was no filigree to begin with.
Key among the movie’s spartan pleasures […]