Wim Mertens, Glenn Branca: Belly of An Architect (soundtrack)

I remember reading an interview with Michael Nyman where he was asked to name his least favourite Peter Greenaway film. Belly of An Architect, he said — just coincidentally the only Greenaway feature film (at that time) for which he had not provided the soundtrack.

If that wasn't cheeky enough, I can never listen to Nyman's soundtrack for The Piano without being reminded of one of Mertens' themes from Belly of An Architect (listen to Birds for the Mind and Time Passing and see if you can hear the resemblance). Nyman's Piano soundtrack came out several years after this one.

In many ways Greenaway seemed to have found in Mertens a carbon copy of Nyman. Both of them started by writing books on contemporary composers before become composers themselves (at least I think that's true: I'm deliberately working from memory, rather than from Google). Mertens' Struggle for Pleasure and 4 Mains sound uncannily like Nyman. In fact they sound like Nyman turned up to eleven: they have that formal minimalism that he learnt from Glass and Reich, but they also have an even more visceral energy just under the surface. In the piano parts you can hear the ragtime and boogie-woogie on the threshold of breaking through.

I think this record (I don't think it was available on CD at the time I got it in about 1987) was also the first time I'd heard any Glenn Branca, having read about him a lot in connection with the New York noise scene. However, as his compositions here are played by the London Sinfonietta, they're not representative of his works for massed orchestras of electric guitars.

MusicBrainz entry for this album