tunequest

Here's the main title for M. Night Shyamalan's 2002 film Signs. Composed by James Newton Howard Shyamalan's personal composer it seems, the titles are appropriately cacophonous and dissonant, but also unified and cohesive. Tense. [audio:061205Signs.mp3] Oddly enough, a number of remixes were created by luminaries of the trip-hop scene and released as a single around the time as the film. Most of them weren't that special, but the version ...

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Songs that sound too similar to be coincidence. This one is quite surprising because I never ever would have guessed the source. A couple years ago, while sifting through the Italian Cinema dump, I stumbled upon a track by composer Mario Molino that sounded just a wee bit familiar, like a demented, psychedelic version of a song I knew all too well. It was the title track to ...

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Continuing the tunequest within a tunequest today, I listened to a handful of tracks by Argentine composer Luis Bacalov during the morning's rainy commute to the office. Bacalov rose to prominence writing film music for 60s and 70s era spaghetti westerns and hard boiled Italian dramas. Prolific, he's got more than 140 composer credits to his name and even won an Academy Award in 1996 for ...

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Always the maestro; always the master. The track is Introductions from The Russia House. Jazzy and smooth, Goldsmith plays it cool for you. I generally find the timbre of a solo saxophone rather grating. Plus, it's usually too "adult contemporary/smooth jazz" *ahem-kennyG-ahem* for my tastes. But that melody that starts around 2:11 is addictive as all get out. Pure genius. [audio:061101Introductions.mp3]

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It seems the television show theme song may be dying, or so says this cribbed AP article I ran across in a last.fm user's journal. It's not really surprising, given that show running times are increasingly crunched as the networks try to crap ever-more ads into the broadcasts. And stylistically, many show producers may be trying to "set trends" by breaking away from the decades-long practice of ...

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This past week I listened to two soundtracks that were spin offs from successful motion pictures. However, neither one was for a motion picture sequel. The first was Joel Goldsmith's score to the pilot episode of Stargate SG-1, the long-running TV show. Joel, of course, is the son of legendary composer Jerry Goldsmith, and is a composer in his own right. I have to give him credit ...

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Starship Troopers is one of many film scores sitting in my library that haven't received much more than a cursory listen from me. For more than four years, Basil Poledouris' score has gone unappreciated by me and, and damn, I regret that. I don't remember the film well enough to judge the music as it's used on screen, but alone, this is some robust stuff. Sweeping, ...

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Jerry Goldsmith's music for Star Trek: Insurrection is genuinely some of the most beautiful (and powerful) music i've ever heard in my entire life, particularly the thematic elements running throughout New Sight. It certainly is among the top contender for my favorite film scores of all time.

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I knew this day would eventually come, since the tunequest made it into the "i"s many months ago. Back in 2001, I ran across a posting on the usenets called Italian Cinema Lounge. It was 225 songs taking up 700 MB and spanning eleven and a half hours of music culled from various Italian film composers from the 60s and 70s ranging from Alberto Baldan Bembo to ...

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