Various Artists – “Overlook – Music Inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining'” (Unexplained Sounds Group)
Before I start, I should qualify this review by saying I’m really not a fan of ‘The Shining’. In fact, I’ve resisted listening to this as it felt a lost cause. I’d go as far as to say my lack of fondness extends to significant dislike, bordering on hate. It doesn’t help that I really don’t like Kubrick or Jack Nicholson. Kubrick’s stagey, gruelling self-satisfaction, his greasy paw print on every scene, snapping you out of any immersion and forcing you to suffer HIS ART is always too much for me. I only like ‘A Clockwork Orange’ because it works as an opera.
I don’t even think I have an exception for Jack Nicholson, but ‘The Shining’ in particular is a real challenge, a succession of lingering shots in which his eyebrows achieve increasingly acute angles, and he doesn’t shave in order to convey madness. Bill Treacher did it better in ‘EastEnders’. I never found anything disturbing about the twin girls, and the kind of people who decorate their houses with fabric based on the pattern of the Overlook’s carpet, thinking they’re terribly affected and archly clever, are the cesspit of society.
You get the idea. But last night, I rewatched it with a view to diving into this album. The least I could do was to reacquaint myself with the score and how it works alongside the visuals. I had never quite appreciated how much sound design there was, or the creeping qualities that ease themselves into the film. For a film lacking in subtlety, it’s a blessed relief. I also enjoyed Scatman Crothers, the only other good bit of the film apart from the score. The combination of Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind, alongside the Penderecki/Ligeti/Bartók compositions deserve a better host. Is there any chance at all that this new collection of tracks inspired by the film will help my appreciation of the film? Surely not…
The standout piece of music in the film is that which accompanies the opening shots of the winding road leading to remote Hell. Here, ‘Sidewinder Ascent’ is presented by Llyn Y Cwn, an electronic music project by Welsh artist Benjamin Ian Powell. Creepy, expansive, and cold, it captures the feeling of the original without actually adding much to it. It’s a bit like covering the theme to ‘Star Wars’; you’re never going to improve it – it makes more sense to develop the ‘smaller’ themes and to explore the corners the film suggests but doesn’t linger on.
Mark Hjorthoy has much more success with ‘The Frozen Maze Could Save Your Life’. Maybe a little on the nose in terms of the title, it tackles yet another problematic scene in the film – that in which a gasping Nicholson gets lost in a beautifully lit maze (for a caretaker, he was really running up the electricity bill) and freezes to death (spoiler alert! Ah, never mind). But the real problem is that it doesn’t look cold at all. It feels more like he’d die of boredom. Hjorthoy does a tremendous job of attempting to fix this, with a bubbling rhythmic theme suggesting going around in circles and an icy drifting melody that elevates the undefeatable threat of nature itself.
Rapoon‘s ‘Descent’ is the only track to take influence from the 1920s hauntological trailblazing in the ballroom sequences. Is hauntology still a thing? It feels like it’s morphed into dozens of other subgenres, but it still feels particularly apt here. It’s only a subtle echo, and works nicely alongside some surprisingly classical piano work, some scratchy radio waves, and a demonic voice that is more troubling than anything in the film. Pleasantly surprised that no artist here went down such an obvious route. Stefan Kalverdal‘s ‘The Haunting’ broods and hisses in the corner, ever-present, disgusted with itself and defiantly inhuman, eventually revealing itself as a storm of flies.
‘The Geometry of Madness’ by Mario Lino Stancati probes the essence of what drives the film, the scowling bruises that already live in the character’s mind that are allowed to fester. It’s angrier than much of the music in the film and more chaotic, which I think would detract perfectly from Nicholson’s gurning. Henrik Meierkord follows a similar line on ‘Redrum’, a ceaseless turmoil of confusion and anguish that feels both personal and pervading.
‘Everlasting Hallways’ from Joel Gilardini moves away from the mind and into the hotel itself, the long corridors leading to tight corners which can’t be glimpsed around, a moaning tone suggesting age, watching eyes, and an inescapable despair. 400 Lonely Things also looks at the hotel itself in ‘Overlook’, a collection of sounds and moods which go from spidery infection to frosted, intense malevolence, going beyond the previous guests to a more primitive evil that was awakened when they built the hotel on an Indian burial ground. Wither the horror film depending on Indian burial grounds.
Oubys tackles ‘The Gold Room’, along with the title theme sequence, the more obvious visuals to translate. What’s surprising is that he doesn’t go the expected twinkling ’20s gramophone music route at all, instead curating a far more pulsating and evil threat, the inhabitants not presented as apathetic or indifferent but actively horrible and antagonistic. Interesting, brave, and a genuine alternative which works at least as well. Michael Bonaventure, Like Mark Hjorthoy, looks at the Colorado winter as the ever-present threat, and also manages to capture an unyielding feeling of cold, a sense that there’s no thaw coming and that at least you had a fighting chance when you were inside.
To conclude, ‘detnemroT mind’ from David Kovacs doesn’t add much more than we’ve already heard, which may be more of a case of his placing on the album than anything he’s done (or hasn’t done) sonically, though Browning Mummary, with ‘Other Kinds of Traces’ supplies what the film definitely doesn’t have, which is something like a bombastic theme which you can immediately associate with it. Lumbering but still agile and inquisitive, it gives the hotel itself a bestial feel, that it’s a living, hideous entity with an appearance unseen by human eyes.
I still don’t think I’ll watch the film again.
Daz Lawrence
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