various artists - Dune (Original Soundtrack Recording)

My therapist's jaw dropped. "You haven't seen 'Dune: Part Two' yet?" All I could say was "nope". I have a great illogical fondness for David Lynch's 1984 dream piece. I like Denis Villenueve and Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet and Hans Zimmer, but I LOVE Lynch and Sean Young and Kyle McLachlan and fuckin' Toto. TOE-TOE, yo! The Porcaro boys play the tunes for intergalactic subterfuge!

Everything about the soundtrack, including the Eno/Eno/Lanois "Prophecy Theme", is feverish and bombastic. I have a difficult time imagining the film with a more conventional soundtrack. Just as much as John Williams' original trilogy scores and James Horner's score for "Aliens", this is a go-to for me for those head down, focus in moments at work. I can't consider giving room to something that might replace it in my brain. Not to mention that the film score/yacht rock Venn diagram has very little overlap, and I think we should appreciate the rare places that the overlap exists.

So here's a Tuesday bonus. Do something heroic or triumphant today. Remember: he who controls the spice, controls the universe!

Discogs

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various artists - Amateur Soundtrack - A Film By Hal Hartley

"I am a star / A Hal Hartley movie / I read my lines / Straight faced in the mirror"

 Kind Of Like Spitting, "Your Favorite Actor"

Here's another Matador soundtrack from the mid 90s, this time from Hal Hartley''s fifth film, 1994's Amateur.

Does it feature Martin Donovan? You bet it does.

Is Parker Posey in it? She is not.

It does star Isabelle Huppert, a secret crush of mine, as an ex-nun named "Isabelle" who gets wrapped up in criminal hijinks spining out of her new career as a pornographer.

Did you get all that? I was told recently I had a way with log lines, but I dunno.

This is one of the places where Liz Phair, My Bloody Valentine, and the Jesus Lizard could comfortably rub elbows back in those days. And I find the Ned Rifle/Jeffrey Taylor score to be a pretty great appendix to what would have otherwise been a decent Lollapalooza 1995 sampler.

8/10. Now go watch the movie. You're going to have to find a physical copy, tho; it's ain't on streaming here in the States.

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various artists - Extraits Des Bandes Originales Des Films De Jacques Tati

The missus is now almost a year deep into daily French lessons, which means I've been watching a fair amount more French cinema than is usual. Which was already a sizable amount.

So we've been revisiting Jacques Tati's six films again. I snagged her Criterion's The Complete Jacques Tati a few years back; no need to figure out where or if they're being streamed. And I found this lil gem in a stack of cruddy easy listening and modern jazz CDs at an estate sale a few months ago. It's all music scored for Tati's first four films, from composers including Alain Romans, Francis Lemarque, and Franck Barcellini.

Slap this on, revel in the caperin' and clownin'. It is all very, how you say, French.

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Ennio Morricone - The Legendary Italian Westerns (The Film Composers Series, Volume II)

Photo of Ennio Morricone with Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza by Roberto Masotti

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

There are giants that we share the earth with, and, until Monday, Ennio Morricone was among them. There are far better eulogies that can be written about him than I ever will be able to jot down. So I'll talk about buying this CD.

After John Williams, Morricone was the first film composer I could recognize by ear. I latched onto his score of "The Untouchables", and as I kept watching movies in the early 90s, like "Hamlet" and "Bugsy" and "The Mission", I kept noticing that the same Italian guy with the name I didn't know how to pronounce kept making music that moved me. Somewhere along the way, I learned he had made the music for The Man With No Name Trilogy, and got really hooked on this piece with whistling (it was "Theme from 'The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly'"). I started working at this Borders-style bookstore in the music department, and this bad boy was showing its cover from the end of the soundtrack section. I used my employee discount to get 50% off $12.99 (plus tax). I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed initially that none of "l buono, il brutto, il cattivo" appeared on this disc. But I got over my disappointment fairly quickly.

Even 30 years after its release, this is a pretty good survey of Morricone's spaghetti western scores from 1963 to 1968. The opener, "A Gringo Like Me" from 1963's "Duello nel Texas", has this earworm quality to it that, within three listens, will have you singing along with Peter Tevis. There are fair enough chunks of both "Per un pugno di dollari" and "Per qualche dollaro in più" to convince you to drop some bread on vintage Italian copies on vinyl. But the pieces I keep coming back to are his four cues from "C'era una volta il West", released in the States in 1969 as "Once Upon a Time in the West". To me, a track like "L'Uomo Dell'Armonica" is just a memorable as "L'Estasi Dell'Oro".

I could rattle off how many records the man sold, or how many scores he composed, and how many times he got robbed of a Grammy. That's part of the legend, but irrelevant to the story I'll tell. As a teenager whose exposure to modern composition only came from film scores, Ennio Morricone helped open my ears up, and widen my eyes to a wider world than punk and thrash records. His nickname was "Maestro" for good reason; he taught me to listen in a different way. Is there any greater praise?

Discogs

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