Brian Reitzell ghosts behind popular culture, having a significant impact upon it without ever seeming to crave the need to see his name in lights. He’s best known as a film composer and music supervisor on Sofia Coppola’s movies, while his work in bands—Air and Redd Kross among them—is something of a footnote in their respective biographies. When Reitzell talks about music, he often mentions similarly anonymous figures as inspiration, finding kinship in krautrock acts and Daniel Lopatin’s Oneohtrix Point Never project. Yet, he clearly commands a special kind of respect in the people he approaches to work with him. How else to explain his teasing of Kevin Shields out of semi-retirement to work on the Lost in Translation score, or getting reclusive Talk Talk frontman Mark Hollis to make his first music in an age, for (of all things) the Kelsey Grammer-starring TV show "Boss"? In his own quiet way, Reitzell’s a powerful figure who can exert influence in the most unlikely places.
For his debut solo album, the Los Angeles-based composer turned to a swathe of his influences as inspiration, while also bringing on board a select band of notable collaborators. Shields surfaces again, contributing organ, while Jim James of My Morning Jacket worked up seven-part harmonies for “Ozu Choral” that Reitzell subsequently manipulated for his own means. There are a bunch of fellow backroom musicians working alongside him here, too, including Mike Dillon, Dave Palmer, and Roger J. Manning Jr., making the whole enterprise resemble something like a cooler version of session-musician supergroup Toto. But Auto Music doesn’t sound like group music, instead touching on areas Reitzell has clearly obsessed over in his film work, including the spacey qualities of The Virgin Suicides score (“Last Summer”) and the hazy shoegaze fug that permeated throughout Lost in Translation (“Ozu”, “Oskar”).
The nine wordless songs here don’t have much to link them thematically, although Reitzell sees them as soundtracks to long West Coast drives through vast, open plains. It’s a record that was recorded over a long period—begun over a decade ago, according to this interview—causing a lack of cohesion at times. Mostly, it’s an interesting curio from someone who clearly spends a great deal of time thinking about music but can’t quite reach beyond the sounds he hears to get into his own sphere. So “Gaudi” touches on the jazzy atmospherics of Talk Talk’s later works, while “Honeycomb” brings in the creaky, piston-like dynamics of certain Cluster songs; “Auto Music 2” resembles his play for a contemporary update of Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn”. It’s enjoyable on a base level for anyone interested in those styles, even if there is a creeping feeling of musical dress-up being played.
Auto Music provides insight into Reitzell’s thought process behind his film scores; listening to a song like “Ozu”, so clearly indebted to the rough-around-the-edges version of My Bloody Valentine that Shields was honing on Isn’t Anything, it makes sense that Reitzell would undertake the (at the time, seemingly impossible) task of persuading him to release music again. Ultimately, that’s not enough to make Auto Music shine in its own right, although there are moments that cut through the surface noise. As “Ozu” makes its descent out of MBV-land, it echoes around repeating slabs of guitar, verging on its own weight instead of borrowing someone else’s. Perhaps this is the inevitable end product of the music supervisor—someone who spends so long observing other work that they can’t get into their own space. There’s something poetic about that, a man’s own advances stalled by the very things he loves, and that struggle at least gives Auto Music a dose of tension at its heart.
