One of my interests is the weird electronic (or otherly avant or just nuttily absurdist) music on animations and experimental short films, sometimes done by a composer or someone the animator-director knows who has institutional access to synths and such, but quite often made by the animator-director.
Prime example: Norman McLaren of Canada's NFB.
I have made compilations of soundtracks and scores having liberated them from their cinematic context. Most of the time the audio - often mixing music with sound FX and cartoony voices - has no existence separate from the film, has never been released as records.
Prime example: Norman McLaren of Canada's NFB.
Until now! with the release of Rythmetic – The Compositions of Norman McLaren
Daryl Worthington reviews Rythmetic at the Quietus as Reissue of the Week
" Born in Stirling, Scotland, McLaren started making films when studying at the Glasgow School Of Art. After his stint at the GPO, he relocated to Canada and worked for the country’s nascent National Film Board. He was acknowledged as a pioneering animator in his day, winning an Oscar and a Palme d’Or. Pablo Picasso and George Lucas were fans, the former describing McLaren’s work as “something new in the art of drawing”.
...Central to many of them is a symbiotic connection between sound and image.... It hits with dazzling effect on 1949’s Begone Dull Care, an animated accompaniment to the Oscar Peterson Jazz Trio. McLaren didn’t always use other people’s music to score his films however, as documented on Rythmetic: The Compositions Of Norman McLaren, the first collection of McLaren’s audio work. Spanning 1940 to 1970, the compilation pulls together eight of his film scores, four unreleased compositions, and, intriguingly, the entire audio for his 1961 film Opening Speech. Most of the tracks capture a process dubbed ‘hand-drawn sound’. Just as his movies often involved him drawing on film, McLaren’s sound works involved him drawing shapes and patterns.
"As the detailed liner notes for the compilation explain, after noticing the glue on spliced film reels produced a sound as it passed through a projector, he began measuring and collating the frequencies and tones different cuts and notches would produce. Over the years, he created a series of cards containing symbols and patterns corresponding to eight octaves of notes, which he then deployed in his sonic compositions. Often, both animation and soundtrack would be hand drawn side by side on the same reel of film."
The blippy micro-syncopated percussive scores that McLaren etched by hand into his celluloid do sound startling and contagious when listened to separately: at times more like demented Morse Code, flurries of dot-dash pointillism, than music. But after a bit I found myself wondering whether they actually worked best in their original visually kinetic context.
Worthington feels the same:
"Sometimes, something does seem to be missing when the hand-drawn soundtracks are isolated. The absence of visuals is a reminder of how integral sound and image were to each other in McLaren’s films. That’s brought home most directly by the compilation’s third track, ‘Neighbours’, originally created for the 1952 film of the same name which won McLaren an Oscar. The short film sees two neighbours get into hyperreal fisticuffs after one erects a fence to claim a flower that has sprouted between their houses. What starts as a farcical punch up descends into disturbingly violent scenes. An overblown conflict which leads to mutual destruction, Neighbours is a scathing lament of war’s violent futility, likely taking aim at the absurdity of the Cold War that was simmering away when the film was released. Left with the sound alone, that uncompromising critique is lost."
While overall feeling the move to issue the music separately was a good idea;
While some things are lost, just as much is gained through the magnifying glass Rythmetic shines on McLaren as a brilliantly unique composer. A facet to his work which until now has often been hidden in plain sight in his films is given the attention it truly deserves.
Here are the original films that the tracks on the comp supported (with the exception of four unreleased compositions)
