Man With A Movie Camera

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I defy anybody to listen to this - Cinematic Orchestra's full length soundtrack to Dziga Vertov's 1929 movie - and not fall dramatically in love with it immediately. It probably helps that I've yet to hear anybody else's attempt - even Michael Nyman's had a go at interpreting the classic pioneering documentary in musical form.

From the moment 'Dawn' opens the narrative with the melancholy of intense drawn out strings slowly extending and stretching as bells, percussion and electronic atmospherics join the thread you're led by the hand into another world, a world which can exist as clearly within your mind's eye as it does through Vertov's classic.

Previously The Cinematic Orchestra had never been quite so compelling for me. Despite Jay's live set up with multifarious live instruments and Cinematic's accolades for past albums 'Motion' and 'Every Day' it is only now I 'get' The Cinematic Orchestra. Maybe because the perfect combination of his music and this 65 year old film lends Jay Swinscoe's sound a gravity, an anchors on which to hang his beats and a meaning outside of the music itself which he needs to convey.

Whatever it is, the beauty, the journey, the richness of this highly orchestrated album seems to be infinite - with more discovered at every listen.

Just who can fail to be uplifted by 'The Awakening Of Woman' where tumbling drums and cymbals compete with the (again) string-led descending pattern or got pensive while listening to the thoughtful double bass and alto sax duet 'Interlude', or moved by the folky plucky 'Work It!'? Or. Who could not fail to be enchanted by the delicate piano meanderings of 'The Magician', be carried away by the double-bass humour of 'Drunken Tune' or not feel themselves swoon to the Oriental keyboard sequences of 'Odessa'?

To then, if you're lucky enough, experience the entire soundtrack played live with the film as big screen backdrop (they're on tour so keep an eye out), you'd be hard-pushed to find anything comparable to this heady combination of musicianship, imagination, history, soul and beauty.