Mentioning Lost in Translation below reminded me that I bought the soundtrack a couple weeks ago. I don't usually buy too many soundtracks, but there were a few tracks on it that I couldn't shake. That Squarepusher track may be my favorite thing he's ever done. I'm not really into his thing, but this slight little track does it for me.

Which makes me wonder to what extent I or anyone else really appreciate these tracks in and of themselves or by association to the movie in which we first heard them.

I'm reminded of the lengthy comments I once read on the Amazon page for the soundtrack to The Pianist. A number of people were waxing poetic about how evocative and moving the tracks were in relation to the movie; about how they instantly evoked the grandeur and pathos of the picture and all that...and I couldn't help but think to myself "err, hello? It's Chopin! Those etudes and nocturnes have existed quite comfortably for nearly a century and a half...long, long before Spielman--let alone Polanski--were ever born!"

Would they find the music equally moving independently of the film? I have no idea of course. My opinion is that they should, but whether or not they do is beyond me.

Which brings me back to LIT. In the midst of my pissy little take on musical/filmic philistines, I wondered if I'd not caught myself out in the same associative crime. It's possible. I certainly think the beauty of that slight little gem of a Squarepusher track is amplified by my association with the film. Would it command as much space in my head when I hear it if the movie had never existed?

How the hell do I know?

Does it matter? Probably not.

Another thing I thought about on the plane was that I liked the Death in Vegas track better in the movie. We never hear the song when the beat goes double time, which surprised me the first time I listened to the CD. I prefer the first, drifting half. When the beat is intensified it loses me a bit.

Being able to listen to at least a couple tracks by Air has improved my view of a group I'd been fairly uninterested in. They'd always struck me as kind of vapid and ephemeral; a little too trendy, but that one Kyoto-something-or-other track I really like a lot. The little glockenspiel detail especially gets me.

What's wonderful about the soundtrack on its own is how it works fairly well as a pseudo-album, independently of the movie, especially for music fans coming from an electronic background. That's not to say pure rock fans wouldn't like it. I'd guess many do. In fact, the album bridges genres really nicely, but I'd argue that the overall texture is kind of electronic; or at least that it is kind of veiled in a thin veneer of electronicness. My Bloody Valentine were headed in that direction, and the Kevin Shields stuff definitely pushes up against that boundary. Although I like the more poppy songs, even the older Japanese one, their exclusion would have made this a fairly seamless collection. As it is, as a soundtrack, it has seams, and that's exactly what makes it a soundtrack, and not an album.

And that's as it should be.

A long time ago, I was put out by the inclusion of a Czech version of a Beatles song and a Czech folk song on an otherwise purely classical soundtrack to The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I realized later that it is in fact what it claims to be dummy: a soundtrack! Not an album. And in that, it mirrors what film really is: an assemblage of discontinuous pictures and sound; an artifice whose only fidelity is to itself, not to the logics that define its constituent parts.

Maybe those Amazon people weren't so wrong after all.

Next up: the other record I bought, that's so good I can barely stand still.