Nosfera-Vu

Herzog's Nosferatu came up in a conversation on FB last night, and the notion was put forward on how the film might have played had Tangerine Dream wrote the score. It was an intriguing idea (and one I had not previously pondered on!) and while the kind of music Tangerine Dream wrote for Sorcerer would have been ill-fitting for Nosferatu, the film might have worked very well with music from Tangerine Dreams's earlier albums on the Ohr label - namely Alpha Centauri, Zeit and Atem. But I digress.... With the film fresh in my mind, I’m sinking my teeth into Popol Vuh’s soundtrack courtesy of this 1992 CD on the Italian High Tide label, which collects all the music from the two soundtracks Popol Vuh recorded for the film, that is the Brüder Des Schattens - Söhne Des Lichts album, and On The Way To A Little Way (Soundtracks From "Nosferatu"). All needlessly confusing, but if you want all the music Florian Fricke wrote for the film, without the edits done to the 18min title track on Brüder Des Schattens - Söhne Des Lichts – the centerpiece of the film’s soundtrack, this CD is the one to seek out. To the best of my knowledge, the High Tide edition is fully authorized by Florian Fricke, but the Popol Vuh back catalogue is such a mess that one is never quite sure. Reissues on CD have been poorly served over the years by the absence of original tapes and much of the core albums are taken from needle-drops and have been subjected to noise-scrubbing mastering. So much so, anyone looking to put together a collection would be best advised to seek out the early CD releases…

The Sound of Hz (Main compilation)

I'm currently listening to Robert Hampson's post-Loop isolationist project Main, and I’m reminded that one of the tracks on the group’s 1996 collection Hz, is dedicated to sound designer extraordinaire Alan Splet. I’d actually forgotten about this until I went looking in the CD notes for something and came across the dedication. This is more than idle name-dropping, as the music that Main were making during this era was very much in the vain of Alan Splet’s work – all hissing, gaseous drones, clanking metallic reverberations and ominous rumblings – the kind of nightmarish sounds Splet created for Eraserhead, Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet and Mosquito Coast among others. I’m pleased that I dug out this Main collection, a double-CD no less, because it’s an album I don’t listen to enough, requiring headphones and a quiet room to fully appreciate all those delicate, lowercase sounds. The packaging on this collection is rather lovely too, instead of the fuzzy video and computer screen textures of previous Main releases, the Hz album is adorned with striking images of rock and lichen textures, plus graphic symbols which I presume relate to the music in some way. There’s a kinship here with the design concept of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, and I see on the credits of the Main album, another David Lynch reference, the images credited to one Frank Booth…

The Tin Drum (1979, dir. Volker Schlöndorff)

I watched Volker Schlöndorff's film last night as a sort of fitness test for watching The Painted Bird, a film I made up my mind not to see when it first emerged, but in a cruel irony, a friend gifted me a copy of the Eureka Blu-Ray over Christmas, and it now stands on my shelf daring me to watch it. I think I wanted to see how I felt about things after watching The Tin Drum, and while Schlöndorff's film is not an especially disturbing film, it has its moments of cruelty and unpleasantness. But what a remarkable performance by David Bennent as Oskar, and while I knew him best from Ridley Scott's Legend, I really couldn't guess his age watching The Tin Drum, so much so that the scenes where he expresses his sexual maturity were quite uncomfortable to watch. I've since discovered Bennett was 12 or 13 during the making of the film, but these scenes in the film remain difficult to measure even as an afterthought. This reminds me that I must watch Gary Rhodes's Banned in Oklahoma documentary on the Criterion DVD before it gets retuned to the shelf.

Whatever about The Tin Drum as a sort of litmus test for watching The Painted Bird, there may be one unforeseen consequence of revisiting the film for my book reading plan for the year ahead. I recently picked up, and was looking forward to reading the critically acclaimed 2020 book The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World, but after seeing that queasy scene in The Tin Drum, where a swarm of eels emerge writhing from a purified horse head, I think I’ll be putting Patrik Svensson’s book on the long finger…