John Parish – Screenplay (Thrill Jockey)

Fascinating collection of soundtrack work from a man probably best known as a producer to PJ Harvey, Eels and Sparklehorse, to name a few. The album compiles work from six different films over the last five years or so. Parish’s affinity with soundtracks apparently goes back some way.

“Growing up, film soundtracks had provided some of my favourite pieces of music – Morricone, John Barry of course, but also Wim Mertens,early John Carpenter, Nino Rota, many others. I could tell that all these influences were buried in my own music, which I thought of as filmic long before I’d ever scored a movie.”

It’s good to hear contemporary artists acknowledge the mutual influence of the two dominant pop culture forms of the 20th century. My own favourite moments on the album are ‘The Girls Rehearse’, which has a lovely laconic mellotron drift to it, and ‘The Island’, with a spikier guitar-driven melody. Both have a pleasing Morricone feel and conjure plenty of intrigue without any pictures.

Not unexpectedly, many of the tracks are short, interlude-style cues, but the whole album is worth hearing and hangs together brilliantly for a compilation.

The full tracklisting is this:

1. Katharina
2. The Girls Rehearse
3. Katja Gives Birth
4. The Minotaur Pt 2
5. River
6. Katja’s Death
7. LBS - End Titles
8. L rsquo Enfant D rsquo en Haut
9. Derniere Montee
10. Girl Wurli
11. Les Billets
12. The Island
13. Sara and Tomas
14. The Spring Ritual
15. Longfellow
16. Longfellow Forlorn
17. Plein Sud
18. A Glass of Wine
19. Sam

And the breakdown of films involved is this:

Tracks 1-7 - Little Black Spiders (Patrice Toye, 2012)
Tracks 8-11 - Sister (Ursula Meier, 2012)
Tracks 12-14 - Nowhere Man (Patrice Toye, 2008)
Tracks 15 & 16 - Collaborator (unused score) (Martin Donovan, 2011)
Tracks 17 & 19 - Plein Sud (Sebastien Lifschitz, 2009)
Tracks 18 - My World Is Upside Down (Petra Seliskar, 2012)

John Parish - Screenplay from Thrill Jockey Records on Vimeo.