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Rating: The girl feels her blood freeze, she looks around terrified. She knows someone is following her, senses a cruel gaze spying on her. She struggles to run through the strangely deserted streets of that city, despite the fear paralyzing her. She finally reaches her home’s door. She enters breathlessly, closes the windows, leans against the wall, trying to catch her breath while she begins to savor the sensation of being safe.
She does not know that the killer is there waiting for her.
To accompany such a scene, one would expect a driving groove punctuated by a blaring bass or a repetitive and distressing “ostinato,” or at most some disconcerting ambient effects, in short, the typical arsenal of any good soundtrack for such tense scenes. But no: a hysterical and excited voice breathes, gulps, pants, accompanied by an atonal and frantic piano on a skewed tribal percussive carpet, a dry bass, sparse background effects, and – quite unusually – no dynamic variation. What on earth is that? It’s not free jazz, not even contemporary music, certainly not rock or funky; the music neither underscores nor describes the events (think of the extraordinary strings of “Psycho” that perfectly capture the sense of stabbing in the masterful shower scene), yet it’s frightening – oh, it is frightening – it fits the images perfectly, yet it lives a life of its own even without them.
Stuff like this is only composed by Morricone, “the genius who lives like a clerk,” especially in the lesser-known scores for horror, erotic, or thriller films his pieces let themselves go even more than usual to strong sounds, noises, creaks, whistles, sighs, screams, distorted guitars, and obsessive percussion. Dissonant and unsettling yet beautiful music. But even in his most famous scores, there is never a lack of a coup de théâtre, be it the use of strange or outdated instruments or whistling the main line of the piece or a thousand other extraordinary inventions.
For someone like me who has always believed in the mental deformity of genius, who has destroyed turntables and needles to hear subliminal messages recorded backwards, who has idolized rebels without a cause and heroes burned in the fire of their passion, for someone like me – I was saying – Morricone has always been an unfathomable mystery.
I have long pored over various biographies, interviews, hagiographies, monographs, and other sources in search of something that explained to me how it is possible that a man so apparently ordinary is actually one of the greatest musical geniuses of our era: revolutionary, desecrator, iconoclast but, by God, so monstrously “normal.” How is it possible that his only act of rebellion was quitting – just after being hired – from RAI?
At one point, after discovering that he – rather than as a soundtrack composer – would like to be remembered for his symphonic and “High” music works, I briefly accepted the idea that Morricone was like Petrarch: a terribly dull pedant who, while striving to compose his erudite masterpiece in Latin, that “Africa” on which he pinned all his dreams of immortal glory, did not realize that those love poems he enjoyed writing in the vernacular for a woman long dead (or maybe never actually existed) would make him our greatest poet.
But it is not so, it cannot be so: look at a photo of him, look at that gaze, look at those manic eyes, that half-smiled ironic grin, that controlled gesturing….
That man hides something, that man has a secret, that man is unsettling, that man is not what he wants us to believe….
The truth about this monstrous being (in the Latin sense of the term) is well hidden among the folds of his over five hundred (I say 500!) works, but how can you, who can listen to them all? He even co-composed and arranged Mina’s “Se Telefonando.” I can imagine him, how he laughed with Costanzo…..He is a monster, I tell you, a monster!
So, to start, get the music for the “animal trilogy” (by that other beautiful soul of Dario Argento); here’s everything: hallucinatory lullabies, wild grooves, metal guitars (Argento for “Four Flies on Grey Velvet” wanted Deep Purple, may God forgive him!), whistles, noises, and angelic melodies for Dell’Orso’s otherworldly voice – the beautiful “Come Un Madrigale” also from “Four Flies on Grey Velvet” – here everything is anticipated, we are in 70/71: industrial, no wave, “new thing,” and all avant-garde and atonal and free-form music previous and yet to come with a freedom that only some Germans showed in those years. An excellent idea to include – unfortunately in an incomplete way, but very little is excluded – the three works on a single CD, although the single cardboard versions accompanied by photos are great objects.
I am not even slightly suspicious that anyone reading these pages has not seen the three films in question.
Listen to it all in one go and then tell me if I'm not right!
I am now certain of it, I know, I am sure: he is a monster.
Sooner or later I will be able to prove it, I will discover what unhealthy secret he hides, which demon possesses him, what unconfessable fire consumes his soul.
Unless he discovers me first.
He is dangerous.
If I should suddenly disappear, if – suddenly – there should be no more trace of Lector, you will know who it was.
(Perhaps just to thank him).
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