I wrote the score for a new documentary that’s premiering at The Tribeca Film Festival tonight. The film, called Pray The Devil Back to Hell, is about the Liberian Women’s peace movement. It’s directed by Gini Reticker and produced by Abby Disney.

This is the second documentary in the last year on an African subject that I have scored (the other was Shadow Work by Nigel Walker). One particular challenge is to create music which has an appropriate African sensibility but is not just ersatz African music, or African kitsch. I always encourage filmmakers to use actual African music if that’s what’s called for — and both of these films do have wonderful uses of authentic music from the places they are set.

Anyway, Pray The Devil Back to Hell needed a real film score to support the intense and moving story of a group of Liberian women who rise up and take on Charles Taylor, ultimately becoming a key factor in bringing a fragile peace to their country. We ended up with a dramatic and quite dark score that uses some African elements but is primarily bass, trumpet, strings and percussion, with some wonderful contributions from the great Beninese singer Angelique Kidjo. It was a great honor to work with Ms. Kidjo, and her extraordinary voice brings a transcendent, human, female element to the music which I could never have created without her.

The track I’m posting here is the song from the end credit sequence. I wrote the music first and gave an instrumental sketch to Angelique, and she wrote the lyrics (in Yoruba) and sang the vocal parts. I also was blessed with a beautiful solo from master Kora player Yacouba Sissouk (who happens to be the cousin of Toumani Diabate). I mixed the track, along with the rest of the score, in my studio.

All of the screenings of Pray The Devil Back to Hell at Tribeca are sold out, but you can get more info about screenings at the official site for the film. You can also see the trailer at that site, which features some other excerpts from the score. And the film has a Myspace here.

I saw There Will Be Blood last night at the cast-and-crew screening at The Ziegfeld, and I’m calling out Jonny Greenwood for the best score of 2007. From the opening minutes until the bitter end some 160 minutes later, I was leaning forward in my seat, amazed and delighted that such audacious dissonance could be possible in a big budget American film - and a Western, no less. The music is what Ligeti might have composed for a John Ford epic, the unholy spawn of a union between Clint Eastwood and Krzysztof Penderecki. Not since Corigliano’s Altered States has a score so elevated what might have otherwise been an upper-middling genre flick. Don’t get me wrong — the film is very good on it’s own terms, and Daniel Day Lewis turns in another fine Oscar-contender. But the music is what feels utterly unique and bold, transforming a very familiar landscape into an alien world of great depth and beauty. Von Stroheim’s Greed could have played to this music.

So who is this Greenwood fellow, I wondered, turning to the internets? Well, well. He’s the guitarist of a rock band I’ve never listened to but who seem quite highly regarded, a band called Radiohead. You’ll have to excuse my ignorance of post-1983 rock music, but please clue me in… are Radiohead as good as this? I’ll have to go and P2P them some time. But first, let’s P2P some of this Greenwood fellow.

This track comes from a Radiohead bootleg found on Limewire, and is actually used in the film, although it was recorded separately a few years ago. Knowing the post-production process, I’m guessing this was probably used as temp music, and then they never came up with anything they liked as much, so they just licensed this track (and one other, Popcorn Superhet Receiver) to use in the film. In fact, the very first music cue in the film is a startling dopplering tone cluster that sounds lifted straight out of Popcorn Superhet Receiver. These two tracks are not on the soundtrack release which is undoubtably stuffed full of all the other excellent music and arrives on the venerable Nonesuch label next tuesday, December 18th.

So do check out the film. It opens December 26th and is definitely worth hearing on a big screen.

The album’s page at Nonesuch is here. The official site for the film is here. You can buy the CD here, among many other places. There’s an interview with Greenwood and director Paul Thomas Anderson here. And there’s a wonderful real-audio stream from the BBC of Popcorn Superhet Receiver here.

For the last five years, people have been asking me for a copy of The Fall, the piece which I wrote for the end-credits of The Wire. I’ve kept that track out of circulation so that it could be part of a Wire soundtrack record, and that is finally happening on January 8th.

The other thing people want is a longer version of The Fall, but that is not going to happen. Can’t do it. I tried, and it just doesn’t make sense. It’s the nature of the track for it to be under two minutes, and very specific, and to just be the thing that we have come to indelibly know as the music that plays at the end of The Wire. When I tried to make a longer version, somehow it just felt trite, like a sellout. Repeating the same material seemed monotonous, and adding new ideas seemed beside the point. So The Fall will stay the way it is.

But here’s a track from the forthcoming record that has the same band as The Fall, similar instrumentation, relevant mood, but is longer and pretty much a fully developed piece of music. I’m playing bass and electric piano, and my collaborator Andre Burke is playing violin, like on The Fall. Over the years, fans of The Fall have also asked for other tracks that were similar, but other than this, there aren’t really any to speak of. The music I do covers a very wide range, and just because you like The Fall, doesn’t necessarily mean you will like anything else of mine (much as I might wish otherwise!).

So here it is, 151 Canal, from my forthcoming “Ambient Electro-Tango Funk Dub” record, X-Ray Yankee Zulu Tango, which will be arriving in January along with everything else. I’m having a “soft release” on December 23rd, which would have been Andre’s 48th birthday, and the official street date is January 15th. Anyone who needs an advance copy of the CD for a review, blog post, podcast, or whatever, drop me an email…

X-Ray Yankee Zulu Tango has its own (currently minimal, soon to expand) site here, and there was an earlier track from the record posted here. My previous record with Andre, Shadow Economy, is available from Amazon, CD Baby, and the iTunes Music Store.

Today finds us with a triple-pronged post about The Beatles. Yes, those The Beatles. One of the very first records I owned and loved, in 1971 at the age of eight, was a scratched vinyl LP of A Hard Days Night, which for some reason came to me inside the cardboard sleeve of With The Beatles. I played that thing to death, and later moved on to most of the band’s other catalogue. But after the age of 14 when I discovered The Clash, and John Cage shortly thereafter, I never voluntarily listened to The Beatles again. As an adult I have mostly felt about The Beatles the same way I feel about Beethoven; geniuses who revolutionized music, but all due respect, I’d most often rather listen to Bach.

Eighteen months ago I started working as the sound designer on Julie Taymor’s new film Across The Universe, and I was surprised to realize that not only do I know the lyrics to almost every Beatles song by heart, but the music is stunning. This may seem like a vapid or disingenuous statement, but I mean it sincerely. At this point in history, The Beatles music has become an archetypal cultural touchstone to Western Civilization that functions in the same way folk music has operated for earlier cultures.

Across The Universe is a musical featuring 35 re-imagined Beatles songs. It tells the story of a young man from Liverpool named Jude who comes to America looking for his father and becomes embroiled in the counter-culture of the 1960’s in New York. The film features new versions of the songs, sung live by the actors, with a few celebrity cameos from the likes of Bono (I Am The Walrus) and Joe Cocker (Come Together). The film is 95% finished, and I think it’s great - one of the most enjoyable working experiences of my career, and the most elaborate sound design I have created since The Abyss in 1989. The film is scheduled for a release in September 2007, and you can see the (corny but effective) trailer here.

Since I’ve been spending so much ear-time on The Beatles, I keep stumbling across Beatles-related items and cover-versions, and today’s mp3 post is one of my favorites. Laibach are a group of Slovenian conceptual-industrialist crypto-nationalist parodist nutjobs who archly responded to charges of fascism by saying “We are fascists as much as Hitler was a painter.” Their 1988 re-working of Let It Be is a radical demonstration of the durability of The Beatles music; the songs maintain their integrity and essential function even when torn to pieces musically, politically, sonically, and artistically. If you like this track as much as me, be warned that it is not typical of the Uber-metal thrashing screaming stuff which beautifully comprises most of the rest of the album. You can buy this version of Let It Be here. Laibach have an official site here, and their Wikipedia entry here is efficiently enlightening. Thanks to my colleague Igor Nikolic for suggesting this record to me.

The final prong for today is the extraordinary book Recording The Beatles by Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew. If you are interested in the historical development of the recording studio, or you love gear, or you are a technically-inclined fan of popular music, this is a bible. Exhaustively, obsessively, insanely, the authors have documented the minutiae of everything related to how The Beatles records were created. We get floor plans and architect’s blueprints for the studios at Abbey Road, detailed photos of knobs, nostalgic recollections from the tiniest of minor technicians, diagrams of who sat where, lists of percussion instruments used on specific tracks, on and on and on. And the whole thing comes in a beautiful collectors-edition package big enough to prop open the heaviest asylum door. Could these guys PLEASE make another book like this about Lee Perry??? Mind-boggling and highly recommended. You can see excerpts and buy it here.

Italian progressive rockers Goblin created many film scores during the late 70s and early 80s for Italian schlockmeister Dario Argento, but their magnum opus is the score for George Romero’s epic B-Movie masterpiece Dawn of The Dead, and this is the best track from that score.

Film music often uses a fast tempo when accompanying a chase or when trying to be scary, but “L’alba Dei Mori Viventi” has the ghastly slow dragging tempo of a nightmare, perfectly mirroring the relentless onslaught of the zombies themselves, and crowned with a drunken, spinning-out-of-control ascending synth melody that sounds like it’s being performed by a zombie simultaneously waving a severed limb.

Due to wack international licensing agreements, the complete original score has never been released in the US on a domestic label, but a version is available here. You can find the DVD of Dawn of The Dead here. Goblin has a site here, and there’s a comprehensive fan site here.

Alberto Iglesias has turned in his sixth excellent score for Pedro Almodovar on the new film Volver, which many are saying is one of Almodovar’s best. The jury at Cannes gave the best actress award jointly to the entire female ensemble cast, and Almodovar took the screenplay award. Almodovar describes the film in his shooting diary:

It is a pop comedy (pastel colours wouldn’t suit it), a false local film that involves a drama with surrealist elements, it isn’t a horror film, but some characters inhabit the darkness within the houses, the dim back rooms, it is an intimate story but with so much action that it seems like a domestic “Indiana Jones”.

The ongoing work from Almodovar and Iglesias recalls the great historic long-term collaborations between Hitchcock/Herrmann and Fellini/Rota, and Iglesias is indeed the creative heir to both Bernard Herrmann and Nino Rota, delivering lush, classic scores with the crisp momentum of Herrmann, the irony-free humor of Rota, and the emotional power of Morricone.

There is no US release date set for the film or the soundtrack, but you can order the CD from Amazon in France here. Almodovar’s shooting diary he wrote during the making of the film is here. And there’s an interesting page of musical recommendations from Almodovar here.

I finally got to see Spike Lee’s Inside Man the other night. I had been dying to see it after reading about the fantastic use of A.R Rahman’s Bollywood tune Chaiyya Chaiyya in the opening and closing credits - some were comparing it to the use of PE’s Fight The Power in the opening of Do The Right Thing in terms of impact and sly appropriation. Well, sorry people… it’s just not the case. The song bears no relationship to the film, and while it certainly creates an energetic and fun opening to a very enjoyable film, the song is better in it’s original context. Dil Se, Mani Ratnam’s 1998 film that the song comes from, is a better flick than Inside Man, and features one of the most devastating endings of any film I’ve ever seen. And the turgid noodlings of Terence Blanchard and Punjabi MC don’t add anything to the song either - I prefer the original version posted here.

You can see the song in its original stunning context — a huge dance number on top of a moving train — in a YouTube clip here. The Dil Se soundtrack CD is here. The DVD of Dil Se is here.

This new release from Harkit Records out of the UK appears to be the most definitive and complete release yet of Komeda’s brilliant score for Polanski’s 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby. It *appears* to be, but it’s hard to be definitive, because like so much else surrounding Polanski, and particulary this film, the specific details are always somehow shrouded in mystery.

The liner notes to this version contain many compelling factoids such as:

Directed by Roman Polanski, whose pregnant wife, he actress Sharon Tate, was murdered in 1969 by Charles Manson and his followers, who titled their death spree “Helter Skelter” after the song by The Beatles, whose leader, John Lennon, would one day live (and in 1980 be murdered) in the Manhattan apartment building called The Dakota — where Rosemary’s Baby had been filmed.

and

To keep the rituals and chants as realistic as possible, director Roman Polanski had Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan and composer of “The Satanic Bibles,” serve as an assistant in the ritual scenes. In return for his help, LaVey was allowed to play Satan in the “impregnating sequence.”

That’s all well and good, but couldn’t the liner notes tell us something about the difference between the two tracks both called “Main Title” which seem to be alternate versions?? Which one is the actual Main Title?? I’m posting track 1 from the CD. There have been several releases of this soundtrack over the years, and no amount of Googling can sort out the details — accusations abound of re-records, mislabeled tracks, shoddy remastering, bootlegs, etc etc. Suffice to say that this release contains a lot of astounding music, which sounds like it was taken straight from the mag masters of the film. There is also a “jazz” version of the main theme recorded live in a Warsaw club in 1989 which starts out as a breathtaking avant garde vocal interpretation but then devolves into kitsch jazz after the 80 second mark, and two takes of Komeda improvising around the theme at the piano, apparently while writing it. These improvisations are remarkable in their spontaneity and rawness - not a view of the composing process one usually gets on a soundtrack CD. It actually seems unlikely to me that Komeda would have agreed to their release if he were still alive.

Krzysztof Komeda was the Polish Jazz master who scored 65 films, including ten for Roman Polanski, the first being Polanski’s 1958 student short Two Men and A Wardrobe. He died from head injuries sustained in a mysterious accident shortly after completing the score to Rosemary’s Baby. (Anybody know that story? The details on that are also mysteriously impregnable to Google searches).

You can buy this version of the Rosemary’s Baby soundtrack here, or from the label in the UK here. Harkit has also just released another excellent Komeda/Polanski score, The Fearless Vampire Killers, which you can find here and here. Komeda has an official (posthumous) web site here.

Kelefa Sanneh tips us to a new soundtrack which is born of corporate wheeler-dealering but ends up as a rather satisfying cutting-edge dance/hip-hop/crooner mashup. Kelefa is never wrong about anything - check his edifying feature about New Orleans hiphop from this Sunday’s NYT if you need more proof of his unassailable investigative prowess. Unfortunately, the NYT does not allow their reviews to be linked to musical examples, leaving us bloggers to fill in the gaps.

My favorite track from Take The Lead is this number which combines 1950’s vocal cool diva June Christy’s version of the Gershwin standard with updates from NY battle rapper Jae Milz, hip-hop gods Eric B & Rakim, and R&B wannabe Mashonda. These sorts of things shouldn’t work, but this one does.

You can find out more about the film Take The Lead here (if you must), and you can buy the soundtrack CD here.

Werner Hertzog’s stunning documentary Grizzly Man has a very pleasant and appropriate score by Richard Thompson. Ok. On the DVD release of the film there is an excellent documentary about the making of the score, with extended scenes of Thompson and his ad hoc band (including a dejected, unused Henry Kaiser) in the recording studio, improvising and philosophizing under the severe tutelage of Hertzog himself. The doc is one of the better views into the film composing process I have seen. Ok again. But there is a moment where Hertzog plays Thompson a mysterious, otherworldly piece of music to try and elucidate the sound he is going for, and that piece of music is what we’re featuring here today. Thompson seems to sort of go “Right then, Werner, I see” and carry on with his usual thing. But that piece of music caught my ear, if not Thompson’s, and I had to hear more of it.

The piece turns out to be Jangelma by Dutch monster improviser cellist Ernst Reijseger in collaboration with Senegalese poet Mola Sylla and percussionist Serigne C.M. Gueye. It comes from the 2003 CD Janna, a beautiful, demanding, uniquely original work, full of challenges and surprises. No world music fusion nonsense here — just three masters of their craft, bringing their unique world-views to the table and creating some very good music together. The lyrics on this track concern the collision of French colonial sensibilities with an African state of mind. Very highly recommended.

You can find the DVD of Grizzly Man here. Richard Thompson’s score for the film is here. There’s more info about Ernst Reijseger here, and his CD Janna is available here.