Lately, I've been fascinated by music creating a "sense of place"--a concept Brian Eno brings up in the liner notes to his ambient work, On Land. Ambient or small group instrumental music seems to do this more readily than vocal music, but I think that the concept can and should be applied to all sorts of music to gain the benefit of a consistency of vision. For example, the best Brian Wilson music always seems firmly rooted in a more innocent and idealized Southern California, a unique and special place you can visit every time you listen to Pet Sounds.
I've always appreciated the ways in which the best film music assists the filmmaker in creating a unique space for the film to exist. This last week in North Carolina has been a cold one (despite my best musical efforts to encourage an early onset of Spring weather), and I've been watching some good films. One of the films I've seen is Transsiberian, a moody thriller set primarily on a train trekking across the the Siberian plains. The claustrophobic warmth of the cramped train car is the sole respite from the foreign and bitter cold just outside the windows, the bleak setting contributing to the tension between the characters.
I composed the following ambient piece with this forbidding situation in mind, attempting to capture the quiet desolation of a foreign train car skittering across an expansive, unfriendly terrain.
No comments:
Post a Comment