I bought this in the mid-1990s during the phase when I was buying up loads of Cale in the wake of his extraordinary Fragments of a Rainy Season album.
It's really a compilation of music composed for film and dance, the films including Olivier Assayas' Paris S'Eveille (which I'd like to see one day) and Primary Motive. And tacked on (cynically?) at the end is a live Velvet Underground track, plus a version of Antactica Starts Here with synthetic instrumentation (the original version was on his Paris 1919 album).
The film and dance music sounds like, well, film and dance music. That is, the film music mostly comprises very short (under 30 second) sequences, loosely stitched together. And it's very synthetic. Nothing special.
As with some of the gently lyrical songs Cale did in the 1970s, which seem miles away from his Velvet Underground work, there is no apparent connection between his film music and, say, his early experimental work with La Monte Young and Tony Conrad (that could be a good thing).
I hadn't realised just how much film and dance music John Cale had done. I just found this list. His career as a solo performer has had ups and downs, and, as a producer, he had a reputation for being awkward, so I wonder if some of this commissioned work was done just to help pay the bills.
|
|
Comments