Consolidation Blues

Moviedrone is dead. Long live Moviedrone...

I’m currently listening to the triumphant end title cue from Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables,” with music by the dearly-missed Ennio Morricone. It’s a very jubilant piece with lots of celebratory brass-the musical equivalent of a fist punch. Yet it doesn’t pass me by how much it doesn’t match my current mood, which is something much more melancholy and reflective. This is not Morricone’s fault, it simply popped up at random in the playlist of scores I have running, and it’s a terrific piece of music.

The point of this is that I feel I’m at a crossroads in terms of my writing, especially now that my Moviedrone column at The Quietus has ended, due to financial difficulties on their end. The hard fact is that film scores are a niche within a niche; they always have been, and it’s difficult to get freelance opportunities when most outlets don’t cover it outside of regurgitated press releases for colourful vinyl releases, especially when the music seems to come last. See the latest Waxwork Records release of the soundtrack to the 1932 Bela Lugosi horror “White Zombie.” It looks like a lovely LP, but there is no reference to the actual music and who composed it on the package, and Rob Zombie’s liner notes are just about how much he loves the film.

This isn’t an exception - a lot of soundtracks now come out without liner notes. What this means is that they’re being presented without a sense of context or discussion about their place in the history of film music, or how different the cues on the album are from the music in the film. Anyway, watch my friend Ralph’s breakdown of the “White Zombie” LP on his Cue the Music YouTube channel (Ralph’s great).

I have some neat commissions coming up, including a fairly long piece I’ve just finished about the career of Michael Kamen that will be appearing somewhere in the near future, so this is good. But in light of no longer having a column, and with other outlets unlikely to take one on, I’ve decided that this is the best place for my writing. So I’ll be hitting y’all with lots of reviews and opinion bits and maybe some audio and video stuff, and I hope you’ll find it at least a bit interesting, at least enough that you might tell your friends.

I’ve also made sure that I’m keeping an archive of links to all the freelance pieces I do, which can be found here. Most of them are currently Blu-ray reviews, such as the excellent Second Sight 4K edition of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” or the fascinating British folk horror film “Enys Men.” But have a skip through and you may find some good eats. And I’ll be back with some soundtrack bits and pieces soon.

Until then, have a better one.