Shore Metric Cosmopolis, © House Records. HWR1005. Distributed by Harmonia Mundi.
Composer Howard (Silence of the Lamb’s, Lord of the Rings)Shore, (Canadian Indie Band)Metric, collaborate on the soundtrack for David Cronenberg’s film adaptation of the Don De Lillo novel Cosmopolis, starring (Wow) Juliette Binoche and Paul Giamatti.
Shore’s score (11 tracks running 40 minutes on CD) is a purely minimalist, mostly featureless soundscape that turns out to be very intriguing as you listen along to what the liner notes describe as “atmospheric, urban … analog synths and layered guitars featuring the hypnotic vocals” of Emily Haines and K’NAAN.
I listened while I was doing other stuff around my studio and lo, the orchestral colours seemed but a monotonous mid-tone greyscale midi melange. But as my mind drifted away to what I was doing and from there back to the music a few times, I realized the music is built to have a movie happening while it plays, and therefore it’s built just right for the job and also right for the Cronenberg movie set in the grey steel and glass amalgam of Wall Street.
The movie is about a successful young trader whose mind calculates only virtual profit margins but grows paranoid as a real world fear for his life invades the cloud of digital greed that darkens around around him. The music mirrors the protagonist’s state of mind, richly textured with anxiety leached of emotion, cresting and subsiding in a great wash of electronic signals, neural and digital, signifying the nothing that is there and the nothing that isn’t.
If you figure you can fit this music into your life, I say “Go for it.” 74.5/100