Written by: Dave Cantrell
I could pretend but that would never do, not simply because, ethically, it’s utter bullshit but, even were I willing to, SEM’s astute readers would see through it before I’d gotten even this far into the first paragraph. That said, quandaries remain. My aim is to bring your attention to a fine piece of work from a legendary German musician that is itself a rather devotional, if sharply drawn, suite of movements meant to address the longtime sonic absence of a suitable soundtrack to fellow German Robert Weine’s larger-than-legendary 1927 pre-talkie masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, no small task given the film’s incomparable standing not just in its native culture but worldwide and the fact that the original score, composed by Guiseppe Becce, was lost long long ago in the dark swirling mists of time. Thing is, that ‘task’ aspect extends not just to the monumentality of the prospect Kraftwerk alumnus Karl Bartos faced once the decision was made while watching the latest print of the movie astonishingly restored by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnao Foundation, but as well to your faithful scribe and here’s why.
Strictly speaking, I’ve not much grounding or writerly experience with either soundtrack music per se or the orchestral/ambient in particular. But, strictly speaking, fuck that. If we’ve learned nothing else in these crazed lifetimes of music it’s that the transactions between artist and obsessive listener are intuitive ones, wordless and subdermal, understood on the same primal level whereupon we perceive love and dread and fear and joy. Art is feel and the trust one has built within oneself to believe the legitimacy of that feel, and on that, ahem, score, Bartos’ score doesn’t simply pass that intuitive litmus test it sets a new – one could say the – standard for all such Caligari-related efforts both past and hence, matching the startling, full-on digital clarity of the film’s latest, and for now ultimate, restoration note for frame.
Consisting of thirty-seven sketches parsed into six acts as per the film’s structure the result, the overarching effect, is one of being led along a mesmeric labyrinth by some luminous sylph, threading through rooms and snaking corridors that emanate wonder, fear, suspense, longing, every step echoing the fateful arc of the movie’s protagonists from their smallest acts to their most looming anxieties. It is, in that sense, a masterwork, Bartos essentially screening the entirety of the movie via sound.
Seeing as the film itself is steeped in the extraordinary art movements of its time – Schiele and Munch could have conceivably designed the look of Caligari‘s characters, Dali and his lot the sets – while simultaneously pulling from the rich disturbing histories of Europe’s long climb toward the 20th century – not least, of course, the 12th C. origins of Goth but as well the, umm, caliginous tones of the pre-Raphaelites and the hordes of writers and painters for whom the word ‘Dantean’ would be an apt adjective – Bartos, while staying true to the mood throughout, opts for a wide palette of tones and influences, of instruments and effects, utilizing what one might term ‘a vast precision of possibilities’ to bring the project an audio spirit that, again, is every bit the match for the visual.
Past the scene-setting “Prologue,” both aching with promise and ominous of portent, we pass through a wide, quite vivid spectrum of emotional moments. The tip-toeing-through-your-consciousness of “Scary Memories;” the waltzy “Full of Life” that could well be its own soundtrack to someone dreaming their way through a surreal passageway carved between Mozart and Sousa; “At the Funfair,” all ghostly liveliness and midway hustle; “Tragic Message” wherein the earthly and the ethereal hook up in the shadows before “Suspicion” comes along to hand us back to the light with all its complications and staring; the piano-founded suggestion of innocence that underlies “Worried Jane” just before the lowered boom of “Interrogation” brings the hammer down in the form of reverbed timpani strikes that sound of accusation moderated by a simple synth horn chart meant perhaps as the voice of authority or that of worry inside the interrogatee’s head you decide and there right there is one of this album’s most crucial assets, stoking the imagination with possibilities at pretty much every turn.
“Jane’s Fear,” for example, with its woozy calliope intro morphing for a moment into the thoughtful like someone lost in diaphonous but disturbing thought then returning attention to the merry-go-round in front of them then back again, then out again, before eventually drifting fully into the fug of preoccupation, all of it to exquisitely dizzying effect or so this listener was affected. Your mileage may, and quite likely will, vary. “Safe and Sound,” meanwhile, manages to be among the most sweepingly cinematic pieces here and does so in slightly less than a minute-and-a-half, pointing as well as any track to the level of aesthetic discipline required – and maintained – from start to finish, a claim that pertains with as much finesse and frisson to the soundtrack’s longest piece “Out in the Field” at almost eight minutes as flush with a tightly contained exuberance and atmospheric flair as any of its more fleeting mates.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it’s the ‘title track’ that most stirs, forging forward from the gate with a propulsive, almost martial rhythm that nonetheless manages to merge the forceful with the delicate before there comes a pause, a sudden drop into reflection, desolate and lovely and alone before it builds again, the human spirit rearising against the odds, resurrection fear and hope all in one fell swoop.
Using every means at his disposal (not least by enlisting the services of still-living pieces composed during his young, pre-Kraftwerk classical days), Bartos, with the aid of Mathias Black & the Ensemble of Sounds, has done what any sane person would have believed sufficiently daunting to the point of near impossible. And whereas we’ve brought you nought but a handful of samples it’s presumably enough to give you ample purchase on the whole. This is, to state the obvious, a significant piece of work, one that doesn’t simply reward the intense listen it deserves but validates, with a hushed and vivid honor, the project’s near twenty year gestation period, In a word, brilliant. In another, necessary.
[The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari release digital only tomorrow, February 16th 2024 on the Bureau B label and is available here]
