Carl Stalling – The Carl Stalling Project (Music From Warner Bros. Cartoons 1936-1958) [1990; Warner Bros. Records]

Curating cuts from just over two decades of musical work by composer Carl Stalling on (primarily) Looney Tunes cartoons, this compilation provides an informative tour through his creatively playful approach to scoring the animations. From evocatively conveying characters and their movements through to the instruments, to riffing on standards and popular songs of the time (including the employment of ‘musical puns’, tying in a couple of bars from a song with a title that could be linked to the on-screen action), Stalling’s work is lively, innovative, and downright fun.

The inclusion of uncommon instrumentation (like the incorporation of studio sirens into musical passages, a ‘singing’ kazoo for a chicken, or rhythmically-staggered laughter) makes for even more distinctively outré arrangements, though it always feels earnestly in service of the music, rather than just being there for extra energy or weirdness.
A few moments of background studio chatter add some sense of the recording atmosphere for the musicians and conductor,

and while some of the cues meant to evoke world regions (e.g., “Chopsticks” for China) haven’t aged as well as the rest of the music, the large majority of the scores hold up fantastically, even removed from the context of their cartoons.

Sam Waymon – Ganja & Hess [2018; Strange Disc Records]

For the score to the 1973 vampiric drama film Ganja & Hess, Sam Waymon uses elements of soul, psychedelic, gospel, and experimental electronic to effectively communicate the weight of stress and cultural pressures upon the lead characters, with (for example) strains of old jazz threaded through echoing gasps and hyperventilation, simple string instruments plucked over intense drone beams, and chanting giving way to clear melodies and horrified screams.

Like the movie, the score is strikingly ahead of its time in terms of content while recognizably using the forms of its day, and while the splitting of the tracks is done in odd ways , it still achieves a bizarre sort of hypnotic momentum while spinning about from one piece of juxtaposition to the next. Though it took almost half a century for the music to receive its own release, it’s aged quite well (though it is distinctly early-’70s), and is certainly worth hunting down for fans of well-made experimentalism.

Miklós Rózsa – A Time to Love and a Time to Die [1958; Decca Records, Inc., Fonit]

In this score to the 1958 film,
Miklós Rózsa

opens with a bold brass fanfare before slipping in stringed gentility, with the balance and interplay between those two sides shaping most of the score. It’s a natural fit for the wartime romance, but despite the care put into the arrangements, the close adherence to the standard full orchestra war film scoring of the time leaves little room for distinction outside of the infrequent and short passages of low-key moodiness.

The woodwinds are employed to nice effect for those slices, and the playful humor of a few moments bring more life and character to their cues than the stretches of brash trumpeting, heavy melancholy, or lushly-played but fairly stock romance strings. Likewise, while the main themes are well-developed and revisited with attentive reworking, they end up feeling too much in line with the scoring done on other more sober war films of the era to really stand out. Appreciable though the quality of the score-writing is, with
Rózsa managing both large and small-scope direction in good standing, it ends up undone more by its familiar form than anything else.

Goblin – Zombi [1978; Cinevox]

For the international version of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, Dario Argento contracted Goblin to write a score, which brought a distinctly proggy (and Italian) vibe to the American film. Electric guitars and an assortment of percussive instruments join the keyboards and bass through a wide range of styles, with tribal chanting and ragtime piano riffing probably being the two furthest points on the score’s mood spectrum.

More standard prog rock does appear, as with the fairly quick “Zaratozom”, and it’s with these pieces that the band seems most confident, though they don’t falter on the steps outside their comfort zone. There’s also a bit of a weird split between full ‘songs’ and what are essentially looped cues, but the jumping about with styles (there’s even a take on country western at one point) helps minimize the dissonance of those shifts. On the down-side, the band’s apparent urge to show off how wide a range they could make the music cover leads to it feeling more like a style demo reel than a cohesive score, and the diversity of the tracks ends up running into itself too often for any individual piece to end up particularly memorable.

Here’s the alternate cover art.

The cover art used in Japan.

In France.

In Germany.

For an Italian reissue.

Another Italian reissue.

Yet another Italian reissue.

And the 2018 remastered reissue.

Bernard Herrmann – Taxi Driver [1976; Arista]

Originally issued with just ten of its cues, Bernard Herrmann’s score to Taxi Driver found the long-time composer drawing on smoky jazz for his arrangements, with saxophone featuring in the main theme, and bass, slow horns, and other wind instruments shaping the rest of the pieces. Stings of tension are worked into the more sedate tracks with abruptness that doesn’t quite derail the momentum, and usually with more ‘old Hollywood’ instruments such as the harp providing the interference. The expanded edition, which includes eighteen tracks (though a number of these contain multiple cues flowing into each other) also provides alternate versions of a few pieces, giving some information on Herrmann’s approach to the material, and how he settled on the most suitable forms for the film.

The dreamy atmosphere the score takes on at times evokes Herrmann’s work on Vertigo‘s score, though with less weight placed on motifs, and the stirring slow march pace taken by some of Taxi Driver’s pieces helps separate the hopelessness of the lead characters out into their own individual sorts of anguish. Some uptempo portions towards the end do stand out as odd fits, but the score at large is a fine piece of work, with nuance and care put into the direction of the various players, and considerable success from Herrmann while working in styles infrequent to his catalog.

Here’s the cover art used for the 2008 reissue by Humo.

And Waxwork Records’ 2016 reissue.

Hans Zimmer – Paperhouse [1988; Milan]

Combining traditional string-driven film scoring with electronic textures and embellishments, Hans Zimmer’s score for Paperhouse inhabits a murky atmosphere occasionally lightened by tingly surges and feathery sweeps. Much of the score operates in muted tones, with an edge of discomfort to the subdued arrangements, and the Terminator-like stabs of flared synthesizers in the later half (an ~18-minute suite titled “Me and My Daughter, We Get On Like a House on Fire!”) do an effective job of overturning the sedateness.

That second half also ups the creepiness of the background sounds, but while it does a good job of building the mood, the arrangements feel somewhat underformed, as though Zimmer had captured some programmed interactions he found interesting and made a piece primarily for the sake of threading them in somewhere. The main theme is striking, however, particularly in its revisited form (with added electronic guitar), and while the score as a whole feels a bit meandering, the little pieces of which it’s made up are well-crafted.

Here’s the alternate cover art.

Trevor Jones / Randy Edelman – The Last of the Mohicans [1992; Edel, FM Records, Morgan Creek Records, Polydor]

Collecting portions of the scoring provided by Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman (though at least four other composers also contributed to the film), the soundtrack album for The Last of the Mohicans splits the cues from the two into discrete sections, with Jones’ (including “Main Title” and its heavily revisited motif) opening, Edelman’s (covering most of the softer material) following, and a track of quiet bass-pulses and airy vocals by Irish group Clannad capping off the set.

For his part, Jones does an excellent job of combining folk (often of a Gaelic bent) with strong electronic textures (the under-surging bass synths of “The Glade, Part II” being a prime example). And while the progression established in “Main Title” does get run a bit thin over the course of his nine included arrangements, its adaptation through the various energies of the film’s scenes provides a distinctive through-line, matching the fervor of “Fort Battle”, the yearning of “Promentory”, and the swelling grandeur of “Top of the World” without any major lapses in comparable capability.

Edelman’s portion also follows the blending of folk instruments with electronic touch-ups, and while he doesn’t establish any themes as powerful as Jones’ main go-to, his melodies do manage a greater sense of organic growth to their shaping. That may be largely due to Edelman’s coverage of the softer scenes, but his handling of near-incidental moments (e.g., the twangs at the end of a bar in the opening of “River Walk and Discovery”) put him in good light for what arguably boils down to a patch job.

Despite the disparity of its contributors (Edelman was allegedly brought in to score scenes as the film’s editing ran overtime and began conflicting with Jones’ schedule) and the trimness of the soundtrack’s selections in comparison to the full score, the album achieves a richness of emotion and engaging flavor that firmly overcomes its troubled production, making for a rare score as enjoyable on its own as it is in the context of the film.

Karera Musication – Koroshiya Ichi [2001; Cinema Monsoon]

The score to Takashi Miike’s film 殺し屋１ (Ichi the Killer)

is essentially a side-project from the Japanese group Boredoms, as all four members of Karera Musication (for whom this was the only release) had put time into that band as well. The score freely plays around with noise and sonic treatments (to the point of including a series of hearing test tones in the opening track, “1″), meshed with post-rock and world music in a blurry flood of riffs and melodic extrapolations. Fine-cut audio splicing comes and goes, weird vocal squeaks push into jazzy horn licks, muddy squelches drift into mad drumming into electric-sizzle guitar, traditional Chinese instrumentation is merged with dub, and so on. As free-roaming as the music is, it somehow ties all together quite well, and the quiet menace that looms up occasionally plays at nice odds with the psychopathy on display in the film.