Yesterday, ahead of the start of the BBC series, The Sound Of Cinema: The Music That Made The Movies, The Telegraph asked their film critics – and then their Twitter followers – to come up with their favourite film soundtracks.
It seems over half chose Ennio Morricone’s deathless score for The Good, The Bad And The Ugly; I went for Taxi Driver, The Mission and The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, then, on the bus going home, remembered a pile of John Carpenter scores, Popol Vuh’s brilliant work for Werner Herzog, Jonny Greenwood’s contributions to Paul Thomas Anderson’s films and a slew of Tangerine Dream scores. As an afterthought, I wondered whether I could include Broadcast’s spot-on Italian prog pastiche – credited to Hymenoptera – over the credits of Berberian Sound Studio…
And on it goes. I’m sure you’ve got your own favourites. But I think there’s a lot of interesting and largely overlooked work on European film scores – particularly the Italian giallo movies of the 1960s and Seventies. Italian prog group Goblin – who worked a lot with Dario Argento – have enjoyed a minor renaissance lately, and Fabio Frizzi – Lucio Fulci’s composer of choice – is due to make his UK concert debut with a seven piece band at the Union Chapel on (of course) October 31. It was nice to see Boards Of Canada namechecking Frizzi (along with Carpenter, John Harrison and ) in a recent Guardian piece.
You can hear some clips of Frizzi’s best work – progressive, dark, electronic – below, and tickets for the Union Chapel event are available here.
Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncRIPid1kQk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUxIEl1tqnY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaYUrUgnHFc