Recent Viewing Part IV

I can't wrap my head around this. It sounds like you're projecting that connection onto the music rather than vice versa.

I can see the connection with the film, but certainly not with the music!

Also, I think Rammstein itself could have provided a far more interesting score to Mad Max than Junkie XL did.

So your idea is: Take any given pop musician, pair him with any given orchestrator, assign those to any given film project and the result will be an interesting score.

Volker

As far as I'm concerned it has worked, really worked, exactly once: Tron Legacy - and that's with a fair amount of help from "specialists". A pretty poor hit-to-miss ratio from where I'm standing. I don't have an ideological problem with pop, rock, electronica or what-have-you artists coming in and doing film scores, but the proof is rather in the pudding if you ask me.

The biggest issue (for me, likely not for you, Thor, which is where we part ways for good on this matter) is how little attention most of these outfits pay to narrative. I feel like the music is rarely even spotted to film most of the time. Junkie XL isn't quite as bad as Trent Reznor in that respect (at least he employs some basic film music techniques), but even so, his many many action cues in Mad Max are desperately lacking structure. They start loud, continue loud and end loud with a bare minimum of sync points or changes in tone. Compare "Desert Chase" from Raiders of the Lost Ark, written for a not dissimilar scene, but which ratchets up the tension throughout and which reflects the ebb and flow of the chase - now the Nazis have the upper hand, now Indy's gotten back up on his feet, and so on (but in a way that's not just simple Mickey-mousing either). It's so much more involving and gratifying to listen to - not to mention light-years more sophisticated musically.

I'm not saying that Williams' neoromantic orchestral style is what was needed, but rather his gift for storytelling. I think it would have been perfectly possible for a talented composer to take Junkie XL's basic ingredients - drums, synths, electric guitar - and create music that does more than just generate noise and basic propulsion.

There have been over the years numerous scores by pop musicians that I liked in and outside the respsctive films.

- Toto's score for Dune is among my all time favourites.
- Everything Vangelis did. (Though I don't consider him a pure pop musician, a cross over artist rather.)
- Quite a number of scores by Hans Zimmer
- The Alan Parsons inspired "Ladyhawk"
- Scores by Mike Batt
- "Tron Legacy" has been mentioned already.
- Wendy Carlos, another cross over phenomenon

And surely others that don't come to mind right now.

Yeah, I don't think you can call Zimmer or Vangelis (or Elfman) a crossover artist anymore.

I'll allow Dune though, Volker, that's a score I quite enjoy (if not love) - but again, it has narrative and themes and "film-musicy-elements" that just happen to originate from a band.

It's funny you mention JXL's "brilliant production" - you'd think, right? But no: Mad Max sounds like ass. Loudness wars to the max, everything squished together and overamplified in the interest of NOISE, NOISE, NOISE, NOISE. Nothing breathes in that score. It sounds terrible. Usually not something that hugely bothers me, but when done to this level it sucks what little dynamism the composition had in the first place right out.

You hear noise, I hear brilliance. That's how the world goes.

^ It's sooooooooo noisy... but it has to be that way to battle with the relentless over-mixed sound effects. It's also doesn't help the Junkie's score is mix in a way that all dynamics are lost do to the highly compressed dynamic range. Loudness wars as it's all time worst.

-Erik-

You can have a piece of music be an assault on the senses and also be mixed and mastered competently.

Yup! THIS!

-Erik-

Spelling errors (emulating some kind of regional idiom or social vernacular) and grammar errors are indeed often used for stylistic reasons in written fiction.

I don't suppose anyone here, of those who could access it, watched the documentary LENINGRAD & THE ORCHESTRA THAT DEFIED HITLER on BBC2 on Saturday night?

What a story. How a group of starving musicians assembled in the city of Leningrad to perform Shostakovitch 7th symphony in 1942, a year into the 29 month siege by the Nazis.

Well worth your time and available on BBC catch-up.

War and Peace

Yes, I quite enjoyed it too. I thought the music was a slightly odd blend of old-school Russian choral and very modern Desplat. Will be curious to hear it on CD.