BLOG 05/07/2021
The Jan Diaries — Films, Soundtracks and Electronic Music
Jan Kinčl wrote this one while going through the programme of the Tabor Film Festival, held at Veliki Tabor in Desinić from 8 to 11 July 2021, where he was booked to DJ and had two days to pick what to watch. Reading through the films set him imagining electronic scores that do not exist, which in turn produced the criterion the whole column rests on: the soundtracks we remember work perfectly well away from the film, and inside it give the action an entirely different dimension.
What the piece covers
Five examples carry the argument. Flying Lotus — beat maker, producer, DJ and rapper, and one of the central figures of the Los Angeles beat scene — is represented by Yasuke, praised for its beautiful synths and the atypical solutions that are his signature, and offered as proof that a score can outlive its medium. Jeff Mills’ Metropolis is the deeper cut: the first album in his CineMix series, an unofficial score to Fritz Lang’s 1926 film, released in 2000 on Berlin’s Tresor. It has a cult following on both sides, among electronic music listeners and among film people, and Kinčl picks out Perfecture: Somewhere Around Now and Robot Replica before pointing readers on to Three Ages, the later CineMix built around Buster Keaton’s 1923 film.
Then Vangelis, and the biggest claim in the piece: Blade Runner is perhaps the greatest soundtrack album ever made, so wound into the fabric of the film that the film cannot be imagined without it. Kinčl mentions the long-running rumour that Jeff Mills would produce an unofficial CineMix version, which never materialised — the Blade Runner EP, he says firmly, does not count. Thomas Bangalter’s score for Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible is the personal entry: Kinčl first saw the film at eighteen and describes it as a distressing masterpiece that left him in a tangle of emotions, with Bangalter hitting the emotional make-up of every scene with uncanny precision.
The part that stayed
The last example is the most physical. Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy arrives as the natural continuation of the Bangalter entry, and what Kinčl remembers is not the composition but the room: the synth leads of The Grid coming through a cinema sound system. Film and soundtrack both, in his description, extraordinarily powerful — and a reminder that a score is heard before it is analysed.
Read the full piece
The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Three minutes.
The Jan Diaries | Filmovi, soundtrack i elektronička glazba → redbull.com