The Shining [Original Soundtrack] - Creem

Fear Is A Man’s Best Friend

The Shining
Original Soundtrack

Joe (I like knives) Fernbacher, Creem, 11/80

Fear is:

—the feel of something huge, moist, warm and unknown slithering its way across your bed sheets late at night...

—turning a corner at midnight on a lonely, deserted street and coming face to face with a laughing clown...

—hearing odd creaks and groans of a house, at night, when you’re all by yourself—creaks and groans that sound like a meeting of panting phantoms...

—running your car through a particularly eerie fog-bank early in the morning when there is no other traffic about...

—the long scream of slammed brakes off in the distance and the accompanying anticipation of a sickening metallic thud...

—hearing air-raid sirens going off on a quiet Sunday morning and letting your mind convince you completely that the bombs of atomic doom are finally on their way and that in about 10 minutes you ain’t gonna be nothing more than radioactive fried meat...

—attempting to write about a “classically” oriented album in America’s Only Rock’n’Roll Magazine...what the hell, here goes!

This soundtrack album of Stanley Kubrick’s edition of Stephen King’s The Shining is the sort of music that starts out as a small, white-hot creature nestled at the bottom of your spine. As you listen to it, the more your spirit succumbs to it, the quicker that small creature scurries up your spine, until, finally, it reaches the base of your skull and fuel injects itself into your boozed-out brain in an explosion of pandemonium, prismatic rhythms and alien desire. It’s a musical probe that’ll cause you to squint your eyes, hunch up your shoulders and commit all sorts of mental chaos against your neighbors.

Composed of works by Gyorgy Ligeti, Bela Bartok, Wendy Carlos (formerly Walter Carlos, whose Sonic Seasonings LP still stands as a sublime excursion into the murky depths of greasy sound); Rachel Elkind, and K. Penderecki, this soundtrack album steps ways above most other soundtrack albums in its uniqueness—except for Ennio Morricone’s frantic score to Exorcist II—by simply going beyond the mere confines of the film it underscores and becoming, when listened to out of that context, a complete entity of its own, dependent only on its own innate force. It’s a soundtrack album that’s transformed itself into a chirring angel of noise and it delves into the horrifying, brittle rituals of sound with an abandon not seen since the early days of psychedelic experimentation, the kind of music that springs forth from the loins of racial memory and the lost chords of history.

The first two songs, if you can call them that, “The Shining,” and “Rocky Mountain,” both by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind, wail out of the speakers like some monstrous sonic-slug screaming out its constant hunger. They’re both shining shivs of sound stabbing away at your mind, eventually pushing it back into a darkened alleyway where it cringes in abject fear for its own sanity. Hubba-hubba. These two beasts of music are frightening and crazed...ELP, Styx, and Kansas go to take a flying “progressive” leap, ’cause this here is beyond anything you could ever hope to comprehend.

Next we get Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Lontano.” Ligeti first came into prominence when Kubrick used his choral megillahs and snuffling organ grunts to fill out his science fiction epic, 2001. Ligeti is a sonic-spelunker content with exploring all the caves of sound and noise available to the human ear. “Lontano” is composed of tiny globules of music kicking in and out of existence, creating as they do so mini-novas of nervous, grimacing sibilancy capable of sickishly soundtracking—ahh, haa—nightmare landscapes of barbaric proportions.

Yet, it isn’t until side two, when that boogie-woogie boogyman of tone and cadence, K. Penderecki, oozes out the grease, that things begin to get really scary and awkwardly weird. Penderecki’s music is like nothing you’ve ever heard before. It’s like two alien teenagers having hot and strange sex on the highways of Babylon, being watched as they do so by chanting crowds of corpses clapping worm-infested hands, in paranormal glee. His music is definitely off the beam, off the wall, into the void, totally INSANE.

In spite of the cutesy addition of “Home,” by Henry Hall and the Gleneagles, the irony doesn’t work, this soundtrack for The Shining possesses more of the spirit of spooky power that characterizes the books of Stephen King than any of the filmic adaptations of his work, including Carrie. If you like musical hysteria and floating head down in a musical lake of fear, then this here is just what you need.

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