The highest of emotions on a musical plateau – 20 years ago the British created a somnambulistic, experimental soundtrack for a silent film classic.
I missed this record in 2003 and that’s why it’s a great pleasure for me to celebrate the soundtrack that Jason Swinscoe and his Cinematic Orchestra gave to a Ukrainian silent film classic from 1929, Dsiga Vertov’s experimental work “The Man with the Camera”. The soundtrack was commissioned for the European City of Culture Porto Film Festival in 2001, and two years later the 17 instrumental tracks filled an entire record. If someone sold me MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA as current orchestral music on a blind date, I believed it straight away. A sound expedition in quiet alternation between turntablism, classical and avant-garde jazz.
The sound here leaves time behind, but the theme of the film does not; the director documented a day in the lives of people in the former Soviet Union – from Kiev, Kharkiv and Odessa. Images that are disturbing today because they bring a playful approach to everyday life – cut up, in slow motion and extra speed – into our rigid media world of war.
The album MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA is above all a celebration of sound discovery, “The Awakening Of A Woman – Burnout” marks the highest of emotions on a winding plateau, a beat suite with strings that continually takes up space and develops drama from voice snippets broken again and again. “Postlude” with its stand-up bass, saxophone and electronics is reminiscent of Tuxedomoon’s “Nazca” from the album HALF-MUTE (1979). The Cinematic Orchestra’s masterpiece is now released in a gatefold double with updated artwork.