Berberian Sound Studio

We start 2013 with Broadcast's Berberian Sound Studio, a score to Peter Strickland's film about Gilderoy, a hapless English sound engineer working on an Italian horror movie in 1976. The film in question, The Equestrian Vortex, is never shown, leaving audiences to envision its horrors as Gilderoy stabs watermelons, rips vegetables, and sizzles cooking oil to obtain the perfect terrifying sound. Similarly, Broadcast's music provides a vivid backdrop not just to The Equestrian Vortex, but Gilderoy's response to his part in crafting it. This is definitely not relaxing background music. I was playing this in the store yesterday and one customer kept commenting on it and asking me, "what the hell are you listening to? I've heard some far out sh--, and this is just...unsettling!" My knee-jerk reaction, of course, is to like this album even more. It's very peculiar, sounding like music for a Vampire movie, such as Bram Stoker's Dracula. With nearly forty short pieces, it features no lyrics from Keenan, though her voice haunts the album throughout, with wordless melodies that flutter and float amidst a dizzying array of sound effects, dialogue, and an instrumental palette that focuses heavily on organ, fuzzy bursts of bass guitar, and swinging jazz percussion. It plays quite logically as a follow-up to Broadcast's previous Witch Cults album with the Focus Group, with a similar collage aesthetic, but that album's fragmented disorientation is here replaced by a more linear collage that pays tribute to the INA/GRM school of French musique concrete composers, Italian prog and soundtrack composers like Morricone, Goblin, and Piovani. I dare you to take a listen! Buy your copy here.