Veröffentlicht
Mar 20, 2015Veröffentlicht
February 2015
- Jeff Mills has begun to strike a sage-like figure as he's moved away from clubland and into futurist philosophy and conceptual art projects. He's made installations based on the Manifesto Of Futurism for the Centre Pompidou in Paris and has written scores for choreography projects that play through speakers attached to the dancers' costumes. When he releases albums, they come with elaborate backstories. 2013's Jungle Planet arrived in a black cube that could have been inspired by the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Mad scientists play key roles in both of the Fritz Lang films for which Mills has produced alternative soundtracks. The Detroit artist has spoken about mankind's need to find natural resources on other planets, and it's this feeling that drives Professor Mannweldt, the protagonist of Woman In The Moon, to speculate about the existence of lunar gold reserves. Mills' soundtrack to Woman In The Moon comes in a traditional three-CD format, yet it still feels like some kind of alien music box. Designed as one continuous piece, with track titles that follow the film's narrative, it's full of plangent chimes, sonorous strings and intricately-detailed beats. Pulsing synth tones provide a radioactive glow.
Working with orchestras like the Montpelier Philharmonic has clearly rubbed off on Mills. His Metropolis soundtrack was full of grinding industrial rhythms (which perfectly mirrored the factory scenes in the film), but here the only overtly techno moments are the segments for the rocket's take-off and crash landing. Elsewhere, Mills uses familiar cinematic tropes, such as swooping classical sections (the aural equivalent of the long panning shot) to evoke the scale of space, or quivering strings and rustling hi-hats for a Hitchcockian sense of suspense. That makes this soundtrack less groundbreaking than either Lang's film or Mills' own early tracks, but it still shows him to be a masterful artist who can no longer be confined to the box marked "techno."
TracklistCD1
01. Credits
02. The Visitors
03. Ridiculed
05. The Drive Home
04. Striking Match And Idea
06. Arriving Home/Knocked Out
07. Thieves In The House
08. The Celebration
09. Mister Turner
10. The Presentation
11. The Launch Hour
12. Moon Rising
CD2
01. Blast Off
02. The Hard Effects Of Adventure
03. The Journey Begins
04. Crossing Space
05. Deep Sleep Odyssey
06. Waking Up To A New Existence
07. A Life In Space
08. Behold, The Moon
09. No Way Back
10. Prepare For The Lunar Landing
CD3
01. Crash Landing
02. Doorway To Destiny
03. The Consequences
04. The Search For Gold
05. Found By Loss And Greed
06. Tribulations Of Greed
07. Chaos And Fanatics
08. Hard Facts Of Life
09. Restitution And Resolve
10. The Woman – The Moon – The End