Some music makes people want to write a novel.  Some music makes them want to draw.  Some music…some music makes us want to make ice cold action films.  Films where stoic masculine archetypes speak in affected, muscular sentences; never revealing their inner life and always describing their power relationships to the world.  Y’know, Michael Mann films.

We’re not shy of our uncritical adulation of Mr Mann (one of 20JFG has seen Miami Vice more times than anyone really should).  Mostly because he still deploys unashamedly epic, emotive music to soundtrack his unashamedly epic visuals that envelope his hyper-masculine matrys.  Where others hide behind sly pop-culture references or lean on the ever-present crutch of conventional orchestration, Mann looks you straight in the eye and tells you it’s time to go to Cuba and play Autorock.  (Although Linkin Park – I just hope that one was forced on you Michael).  Where Herzog had Popul Vuh construct dense, referential scores for his battles with Kinski, Mann seems always to bias his soundtracks towards music that just sound fucking cool over visual that…just look fucking cool. Vive le Cinema du Look!

Which quite obviously brings us on to today’s mp3:

Picture’s Malmo City Tunnel is, I think it fair to say, unabashedly epic.  There is a tunnel in LA where crews often film.  It’s lined with tiles and the lights of the cars look incredible refracted around its interior.  Deckard drives through it in Blade Runner.  As the continental synths drift over the looped choir that begins Malmo City Tunnel you can’t help but overlay the winter-light-tropes of Sweden on top of another plunge through an urban centre.  The Malmo City Tunnel is a rail line beneath that city, yet Picture make us think of flying.  The looped reverberating time-stretched vocal helps the waves of synths push against the edges of its wide, widescreen vistas.  Gliding and soaring, where by all rights we should be descending.

Picture – Malmo City Tunnel

Malmo City Tunnel is taken from Picture’s EP, True.  That’ll be out soon on the Cascine label.

Epilogue -
This post is tagged with Cascine