The most significant love-hate musical relationship of my life has been – and continues to be – with film scores. Few idioms have the power to elevate, charm, horrify, astonish and amaze us more while at the same time displaying the irresistible propensity to eschew all originality and imagination in favour of the most derivative bluster and cheese. For me, the epicentre of this love-hate relationship has for many years been centred on Hans Zimmer. He’s someone whose work i’ve appreciated and enjoyed in the past: i think True Romance was the first time i really took notice of his work, and what he did for Inception is hard to beat. But his most recent work – especially his collaborations with director Christopher Nolan, each film of which Zimmer has emphatically marred – has been an ever more reductionist descent into some of the most unoriginal, flaccid, bombastic and manipulative histrionics ever created: musica generica, made all the more horrendous to experience due to its inherent terror of ever falling silent. It’s not just nature, it seems, that abhors a vacuum; Zimmer has clearly convinced himself that if the noises he’s generating (yes: generating, not composing) stop for even a moment, then all hope of maintaining the film’s impetus is lost.
Proms 2019: Hans Zimmer – Earth; Alexia Sloane – Earthward (World Premières)
Mixtape #19 : Best Albums of 2010
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
It’s 1 January, which means it’s 5:4‘s birthday, and today we’re three years old. Having spent several days looking back on last year’s most outstanding releases, what better way could there be to start the new year than with a new mixtape, featuring one track from each of my forty best albums of 2010. As you’d expect, it’s another extremely eclectic mix, and this time lasts a little over three-and-a-half hours. If you like the mix (and how could you not?!), please support the artists and buy their excellent music.
Here’s the tracklisting in full (click the image for high-resolution artwork): Read more
Tags: *AR, Ambarchi/O'Rourke/Haino, Anders Brødsgaard, Autechre, Belle and Sebastian, Benjamin Dauer, Celer, Christopher McFall, Chubby Wolf, Clem Leek, Clouwbeck, CocoRosie, Demdike Stare, Ekca Liena, Get Well Soon, Greg Haines, Hans Zimmer, Heidika, Jenks Miller, Jexper Holmen, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, Jónsi, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Matthew Herbert, Nicholas Szczepanik, Noveller, O.Children, of Montreal, Oneohtrix Point Never, Robyn, Solo Andata, Stefano Scodanibbio, Supersilent, Svarte Greiner, Talvihorros, The Birthday Massacre, Tor Lundvall, United Bible Studies, Yui Onodera
Best Albums of 2010 (Part 2)
* Please note this list has how been superseded by the one on the Best Albums of the Years page *
Bringing the year to a very happy end, here’s the second twenty of my forty Best Albums of 2010:
20 | Anders Brødsgaard – Galaxy
In terms of CD releases, precious little contemporary instrumental music has made any kind of impression this year, which i find rather worrying. Not so with Anders Brødsgaard, whose 40-minute orchestral work Galaxy, composed over 10 years ago, finally found a release on the innovative Danish Dacapo Records label. A work of that scale, composed as a single movement span, is likely to put off some people, but it’s such a relief to hear music not constrained by the kind of generic limitations that afflict so much new music. Brødsgaard lives up to his cosmic title; drawing on a plethora of compositional ideologies, and structuring them on a spiral, he’s created one of the richest orchestral works i’ve heard in a long time.
19 | Get Well Soon – Vexations
Neil Hannon pissed away his credentials as a pop sophisticate long ago, and the mantle has fallen to Konstantin Gropper, whose Get Well Soon project has been gradually making a name for itself over the last few years. His unique brand of instrumental pop, akin to Belle and Sebastian but more bullish, is brilliantly displayed on Vexations, the lyrics of which are worthy of a lengthy discussion in their own right. i wrote at length about this album back in March, and my views have, if anything, intensified; ever serious but always accessible, Gropper’s melodies are utterly exquisite, augmented by the deftest of instrumental accompaniments. Read more
Tags: Ambarchi/O'Rourke/Haino, Anders Brødsgaard, Belle and Sebastian, Celer, Christopher McFall, Chubby Wolf, Clouwbeck, CocoRosie, Get Well Soon, Hans Zimmer, Heidika, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Matthew Herbert, of Montreal, Stefano Scodanibbio, The Birthday Massacre, United Bible Studies, Yui Onodera
The perfect movie soundtrack: Hans Zimmer – Inception
It’s been said that the perfect movie soundtrack is one that integrates itself so well into the fabric of the film that you don’t notice it’s there. i suspect that belief arises as much from experiencing the jarring æsthetic bifurcation that ensues from badly-executed soundtracks as from witnessing the seamless assimilation of sound with sight. The very best soundtracks of all, to me at least, are so good, so interesting, that they’re utterly unignorable. But it would be a mistake to say, in calling attention to themselves, that they’re too interesting; in the same way as an outstandingly effective mise en scène, or wardrobe design, or cluster of special effects, we’re conscious of their brilliance while remaining firmly locked in engagement with the film. My first podcast focused on one of the very best examples of that, in Antichrist, and more recently Hans Zimmer has achieved something similar in his soundtrack for Christopher Nolan’s outstanding film Inception. It helps that the movie is as good as it is; i’ve not seen a film as engrossing as Inception in a while, which therefore presents Zimmer with something already extremely impressive to work with. and yet, as Zimmer has explained, he didn’t create his soundtrack with reference to any of the visuals, working instead from just the script, using that alone to ignite his imagination. It’s a risky approach, but a suitably unconventional one for a film that falls so far outside the realm of conventional thrillers. Read more
Tags: Hans Zimmer
Proms 2019: the premières – how you voted
Speaking of disinterest, it was one of those Bach-related works, Ailie Robertson‘s Chaconne, that received the biggest ‘Meh’ response overall, closely followed by Freya Waley-Cohen‘s Naiad, while at the opposite extreme, the work that proved most divisive was Tobias Broström‘s Nigredo – Dark Night of the Soul, with opinions strongly polarised. But away from the shrugs and the bickering, here are the main winners and losers of this year’s Proms, as voted for by you. Read more