I am planning to write a review for the score to ‘There will be blood’ soon. I want to wait untill I have fully digested the album and heard it in the context of the film. Before that I want to make a quick point about a quote by Mr. Greenwood in a recent New York times article.
“New music was always a big deal to me…to me it just made sense that I had Pixies records and Messiaen’s ‘Turangalila symphony’. i started thinking of them in the same way really”
This is surely where we should be at the moment. We have the grand and vast array of ’stuff’ being produced (visually, musically) and we can source and be influenced or just amazed by it all. I think it goes even further, back into history. In 2008 we have access to the cultural products of all that wnet before us. Whilst the context (geographically, philsophically and culturally) has changed the fact remains. We can be looking at a ritual mask from 12th Century Angola or a Frank Stella painting from 1970. As artists we don’t have to overly concern ourselves with the socio-historical context of the work that so obsesses and pollutes historians and writters. Instead we can source these objects for any form of inspiration we want. Starting to realise I potentially sound like a typicaly middle class, male white westerner, happy to basadise and bankrupt other cultures in the puruit of my own aims. I am not sure I buy into this though, so will stick with my initial thoughts, however rambled.
Greenwood is a perfect example of how all these influences can come together to enrichen the process. His ‘Bodysong album’ was great and his compilation of songs released on the ‘Trojan Recrods’ label is fantastic. No wonder he is capable of producing (in the space of a year) a classcial score of such depth and variety, to build strange large expansive sampling machines to stretch the possiblilty of Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’ tendencies and to produce riffs as startling as that near the end of ‘Bodysnatchers’.
