Category: Soundtrack

Piero Umiliani :: Il Corpo

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Piero Umiliani’s Il Corpo is the sound of something beautiful beginning to sour. Released in 1974, the soundtrack finds the Italian composer in familiar aesthetic territory, where jazz, funk, psychedelia and library music bleed into one another. Sunny music for shady people, it embodies the anything-goes spirit of Italian library music, spinning a parallel film from grooves, fuzz and atmosphere.

The Wicker Man (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

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Part folk record, part pagan fever dream, The Wicker Man’s soundtrack is so steeped in sex, fertility, ritual and ancient melody that listening to it feels like stumbling upon something unearthed rather than recorded. Paul Giovanni’s songs create a world that feels simultaneously ancient and entirely invented—warm, earthy, erotic and communal, and perhaps all the more unsettling for sounding so beautiful.

Lee Ranaldo :: Guitar-Centric Film Soundtracks

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As a member of Sonic Youth, Drift, and his many other musical detours, Lee Ranaldo has treated the guitar as a pure sound source, creating dynamic new expressions in rock & roll and the avant-garde alike. But Ranaldo’s new project, a soundtrack to director Joris Postema’s “eco-doc” The System, presents a new side of Lee, that of a filmic composer. To commemorate the album’s release, Ranaldo sent over notes about nine other guitar-centric soundtracks that serve as conceptual inspirations for The System.

Nala Sinephro :: The Smashing Machine Original Soundtrack

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Nala Sinephro might not be the first name you’d think of when it comes to wrestling-movie soundtracks, but the emerging ambient jazz star’s work for Benny Safdie’s biopic has plenty of force. Her brief but evocative score uses her familiar tools – harp, synths, sax, occasional percussion – to create an atmosphere of tumultuous reflection and serenely ominous potential. In its tenderness and ambiguity, it traffics in a different sort of destruction.

Tarpon :: A Soundtrack (1974)

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Before Jimmy Buffett became a corporation, he was a rangy and somewhat ragged country-folk singer/songwriter living a low finance life, still discovering his marketable Margaritaville persona. One of the projects he worked on in those […]

Pink Floyd :: Childhood’s End – The Soundtracks

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Film was a surprisingly persistent thread in Pink Floyd’s early career, running alongside—and sometimes intersecting with—their better-known experiments in psychedelia and space rock. From their appearance in Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London and music for The Committee to their contributions to Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point and, ultimately, the two Barbet Schroeder soundtracks, cinema gave the band a place to explore ideas and textures that didn’t always fit neatly into the Pink Floyd canon. Heard together, this body of work reveals a less ceremonious, more volatile version of the band: darker on More, looser and more playful on Obscured by Clouds, and often willing to follow an idea into strange territory without worrying whether it sounded like a “Pink Floyd record.”