Say what you will about Moby (me, I don’t necessarily have an opinion about him one way or another), but this is pretty cool:
“hi,
i’ll keep this brief.
this portion of moby.com, ‘film music’, is for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film….“
If you’re an independent radio or film maker, this is pretty sweet.
Thanks to Rabia for the link.
I have been flummoxed by, but so far unable to write anything about Microsoft’s hideous product Songsmith. It is the death of music and the end of art. It is what the world will sound like when every last real, individual human is replaced with soulless replicants (next tuesday, at this rate).
But some genius by the name of Johannes Kreidler has used Songsmith to score the soundtrack to our crumbling economy and declining society.
Watch it here:
I did and laughed until I cried. Then I cried and cried.
Found at WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, the Boing Boing for music geeks.
The post below is over two years old. I am reposting it for two reasons: the download link is still active (it was reupped eons ago!) and I just watched Eraserhead with my 17-year-old son last night.
It’s a Christmas tradition worth sharing.
No kidding.
In the 80’s, when I was a teen, my sister married a guy named Tony who became like a mixture of big brother and best friend to me.
We became inseparable and would often haunt all the video rental stores in a 50 square mile radius for weirder and weirder movies.
I was heavily into reading about movies that – in that pre-internet age – I had little hope of ever seeing. I had read about John Waters, Russ Meyers, Jodorowsky and others for years and craved to see them all. We found that the myriad of video rental stores, almost all of them mom-and-pop owned, usually had one or two weird gem tucked away somewhere. Often the owner would be curious and pick up some movie, despite it being esoteric and weird for hickoid Vancouver Washington.
So, imagine our surprise and delight when we found a video store* that had a copy of Eraserhead. I had been reading about this movie in the excellent book For One Week Only and would exhaustively read and reread the plot synopsis. I was intrigued also by snippets of the soundtrack that I would hear on late night radio shows on KBOO. Eraserhead occupied this holy place of weird movies on my list of must sees. We were so exited, we immediately went home to my Mom and Dad’s and set up two VCRs (kind of unheard of, unless you were a complete movie geek back then) to copy it. Such a sacred document needed to be preserved, didn’t it?
We watched it awestruck. Nothing I had read about it prepared me for it. I was numb for days afterward.
The buzz was infectious, apparently as others in my family wanted to know what the broughhaha was all about. This was Christmas holiday and we ended up showing it to lots of my family on Christmas eve. My Dad, who was used to Tony and I watching strange movies vacated the living room. As long as it wasn’t dirty or really violent or profane, he more or less didn’t care what we watched.
So, it was a surreal Christmas. David Lynch’s bizarre little piece of art became both conversation piece and theme for that particular Christmas. At least that’s how I remember it.
*The store that had it is still open. They still take courageous chances with movies, as well. It’s Video Connections in Hazel Dell, a suburb of Vancouver Washington.
David Lynch and Alan Splet
Eraserhead Soundtrack
I.R.S.
I don’t have to explain any of this to you, do I?
This is one of the few movie soundtracks that stands up well without its visuals. It’s a brilliant piece of Musique Concrete all on it’s own. And this is also the way I first encountered Eraserhead, thanks to a very outre radio show host (Daniel Flessas, Outside World). Lynch wisely chose to simply sample two long samples of the film itself, rather than isolate out any musical elements (largely made up of borrowed Fats Waller organ music). the result is a creepy industrial soap opera, set in some limbo-like hell. the oft-covered In Heaven song was penned by the late, great Peter Ivors, of Vitamin P and New Wave Theatre fame.In heaven, everything is fine.
(re-upped 11/12/06)
…here’s an old Halloween mix I did in 2006. A little dark and ugly, but there you have it:
1. Siouxsie and the Banshees – Halloween
2. MX-80 Sound – Halloween
3. Matt Clifford – The Return of the Living Dead Theme
4. Karl-Ernst Sasse – Kampf Golem und Floriano
5. Horrific Child – Horreur Indescriptible Et Accumulee
6. Rev. Jim Jones – Last Recordings
7. Laibach – Smrt za Smrt
8. Throbbing Gristle – Hamburger Lady
9. Charles Manson – Tom Snyder Interview
10. Sonic Youth – Death Valley ‘69
11. Skinny Puppy – Worlock
12. My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult – …And This Is What The Devil Does!
13. The Cramps – I Was a Teenage Werewolf
14. Roky Erikson – Burn the Flames
15. SPK – Agony of the Plasma
16. Goblin – Witch (from Suspira)
17. Angelo Badalamenti – The Black Dog Runs at Night
18. Butthole Surfers – Graveyard
19. Paul Giovanni – Appointment with The Wicker Man
Kill Ugly Samhain Sacrifice.mp3 ( 66.6 minutes, 66 megs)
I’m really hoping I get the chance to spin some discs sometime around Halloween this year.
If I do, I’ll be sure to post it here. If not, I may have to do another mix.
Goran Bregovic
Mercury, France
An excellent soundtrack to one of the greatest movies of all time, Emir Kusturica’s Underground, aka Once Upon a Time There Was a Country.
If you’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing this film from the former Yugoslavia, the sound of the Gypsy brass band that is in virtually every other scene will be stuck in your head for months. The raucous sounding Kalasnjikov, which is heard throughout the film, is here, as is the haunting War, complete with a tragic children’s choir.
Here, rather than simply lift the songs from the soundtrack, many have been recreated and in some cases rearranged completely by Bregovic and his band.
Some songs are a beautiful fusion of Balkan folk with electronica, such as The Belly Button Of The World with great sounding Middle Eastern percussion as well as a pulsing electronic beat, which sounds oddly appropriate for a film that covers fifty years of the history of Yugoslavia.
Missing in action is the German hit song Lili Marleen that crops up throughout the film. First heard when the protagonist’s city falls to the Nazis and later when the Allies defeat them, it’s used throughout the movie to underscore the tragi-comic events. I’ve included it inside as a bonus track.
Lovers of traditional Balkan music, Euro-Folk, Klezmer or any exotic music will find this soundtrack enjoyable whether they’ve seen this film or not.
By request.
