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 [...]
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 [...]
The title to Douglas Gordon’s exhibit currently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from about 1992 until Now — could mistakenly give the impression that it’s a single compression, a montage, of elements of various moving-image works by various creators from the past five years.
In [...]
News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) An illustrator has taken the concept behind Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” and applied it to his daily self-portraits (snooks.livejournal.com). … (2) The Wild Beast is the name of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) new music pavilion. It was designed by the Los Angeles-based [...]
Film composer Elliot Goldenthal has been an underscorer worth keeping an eye on at least since 1989, when his Drugstore Cowboy and Pet Semetary both saw release. Of course, he’s not afraid of bombast, as his Titus with his partner, director Julie Taymor, showed. Now they’re back with Across the Universe, which sounds a bit [...]
Quote of the Week: “They do not need to be correct because they are symbols; they stand for the essence of music, not specific notes. Their unconventionality also reminds me of the graphic scores of experimental music; they are their kitschy cousins.” That’s Christian Marclay, as quoted on the back of his new box-as-book collection, [...]
Quote of the Week: Osamu Tezuka is the subject of a retrospective exhibit, Marvel of Manga, at the Asia Art Museum (asianart.org) in San Francisco. (Full disclosure: I am employed by one of the exhibit’s corporate sponsors.) Of a Beethoven manga by Tezuka, titled Ludwig B, the exhibit notes state, “Possibly because of [...]
The performance of the play In the Solitude of Cotton Fields by Bernard-Marie Koltes, earlier this year at the Battersea Arts Centre in London, sure must have been quiet. That’s judging by the score, which its composer, John Chantler, has posted at inventingzero.net. The six MP3s, ranging from a seven and a half minutes to [...]