By: Si Forster
Sinoia Caves | facebook |
Anyone who has watched Panos Cosmatos’ 2010 sci-fi/horror Beyond The Black Rainbow will have almost certainly had their brain fried by the experience, whether they liked it or not. Seemingly influenced by as much of the 1980s as possible, it could only have been more retro/futureshock if David Warner had appeared somewhere. It’s a veritable assault on the senses that decides to eschew dialogue in favour of really striking visuals and the overall effect is that of someone giving Michael Mann the reins of 2001: A Space Odyssey and hiding all the pastel crayons.
With this level of visual overload and the gleeful dip into the early 1980s for means, motive and opportunity, the soundtrack could only be the sort of analogue electronic paranoia that was just as much a part of so many of my favourite films of that era. Undertaking this task is Sinoia Caves, which mostly comprises one Jeremy Schmidt taking time out from playing with Black Mountain and roping in their drummer (Joshua Wells) for a couple of tracks while he’s at it.
Just as Cosmatos doesn’t take his influences from just the one source, neither does Schmidt. Opener Forever Dilating Eye has that pulsating John Carpenter bassline starting the tune and almost lulling the listener into a false sense of familiarity in doing so, but the music that overlays this is more reminiscent of Nobuo Uematsu’s similarly-cyberpunk-themed Final Fantasy VII soundtrack before Wells puts an urgent drumbeat over the top of an already heightened piece.
From then on, it’s a mix of the ambient, the benign and the downright disturbing as Sinoia Caves’ soundscapes bed in and become just as mindbending as the film’s visuals. Perhaps the strangest part of this project is that when it’s sat outside of the context of the film as it is here, the score becomes more potent for being separate. This is especially true for Arboria Tapes – Award Winning Gardens as it appears in the film early on as pleasant backing to a rather visually busy bit of exposition (and the largest bit of human speech in the whole film) so gets lost behind it all, but here it’s a multi-layered collection of sounds and melodies that confounds the listener at every turn.
The most musically arresting tracks are the two Sentionauts pieces, both featuring overdriven organ sounds and a feel not dissimilar to Tangerine Dreams’ own soundtrack to The Keep, but it’s the experimental tones of 1983 – Main Theme and 1966-Let The New Age Of Enlightenment Begin that are the strongest tracks on here, both taking their structures from the years that their titles describe: the former a lonely, sinister, driving-through-a-tunnel montage affair; the latter pretty much going “the Full Delia” across almost the whole of the album’s Side 2 with an oppressive psychedelic electronic exploration that can be rather favourably be compared to a dystopian sci-fi version of the mushroom eating lunacy segment of A Field In England before future-echoing Boards Of Canada’s Tomorrow’s Harvest. It’s certainly indulgent, but given the nature of the film and the specifics of the images that he was given to work with, it couldn’t be anything less.
Released (finally!) as a joint venture between soundtrack aficionados Death Waltz and Black Mountain’s label Jagjaguwar, this is a hugely interesting record that will certainly reignite interest in the film – and rightly so. It may well occasionally seep into and overwhelm areas of the brain that are usually best left to process other things, but the heart of it is the sort of grandiose wonder that musicians tend not to be allowed to do much of any more. Beyond The Black Rainbow’s soundtrack is perfect accompaniment to a truly strange film, and is also strong enough to stand on its own as a great piece of antique psychedelic electronica.
