Blame it on guilt by association, but Jason Swinscoe and the Cinematic Orchestra never entirely deserved the cocktail-lounge reputation that was dumped on their heads when the trip-hop hangover set in. It's sit-down music by any measure, but casual wine-and-cheese conversation doesn't suit it quite like sitting in a darkened room to the accompaniment of some motion-picture visuals-- an experience that amplifies the music's actual purpose instead of letting it aimlessly float around in the background. This has long been the relationship between music paired with film-- Bernard Herrmann's soundtrack for Vertigo and Jerry Goldsmith's Alien weren't made to accompany early-morning jogs, and they'll make your dinner party more unnerving than is necessary, but when bodies are falling and monsters are stalking they sound absolutely peerless. Not every score can be a Shaft-style pop-music crossover that works just as well outside the theater.
Man With a Movie Camera, which was made to score the 1929 Dziga Vertov documentary of the same name, has stood for the better part of a decade as the Cinematic Orchestra's most prominent effort to reconcile that visual-underscore orchestration, with their blend of string-section jazz informed by another corner of cinema-- think Taxi Driver and Chinatown, to re-invoke Herrmann and Goldsmith. But the acid-jazz influence that characterized their other high-profile moments, whether stark and spare ("To Build a Home") or sweepingly lavish ("All That You Give"), takes a backseat to classical compositions on In Motion #1. And while it's the most cinematic and orchestral record with their name on it, it's also not entirely a Cinematic Orchestra album, either-- note the little fine-print "presents" on the cover-- as they've outsourced a few ideas to composers who are more deeply rooted in chamber music and modern classical.
The seven songs on In Motion #1 were commissioned as alternate scores to seven short avant-garde films, and without those inspirations unspooling in front of the listener, there's a strange incompleteness to most of them. Of the three Cinematic Orchestra tracks, only "Necrology" feels like something that can stand on its own two feet; glassy piano melodies burble warmly over a tricky-signature drum barrage, and the theme rides out through subtle shifts that keep the dynamic from going flat. The other two cuts run long and fall short. The 20-plus-minute "Entr'acte" aims for a jarring contrast between bucolic pleasantness and waves of impending doom, but it evokes nothing more stirring than a vaguely artsy commercial for wireless gadgets or German performance sedans, and its build into a flimsily "epic" rock-drum coda is too little and too late to feel like the culmination of anything. The swooning uplift of "Manhatta" sounds like it could be from any blandly inspirational period piece about a never-say-die racehorse or an ambitious industrialist with a crazy dream.
The other contributors run through their own variations, all slow-paced and subtle and pushing nine minutes or more. Austin Peralta's dreamlike piano-and-strings "Lapis" is the most immediately beautiful of the pieces; Grey Reverend's acoustic guitar-driven "Regen" has some fine Astral Weeks interplay with the string section here and there; and the two tracks by Tom Chant and Dorian Concept, "Outer Space" and "Dream Work", lace raw-nerve suspenseful movements with piercing saxophone solos that jump out like suddenly scattering birds. Yet there's still something naggingly missing in these pieces, as if you're only catching one side of a potentially fascinating conversation.
But all the films those songs score are readily available on YouTube-- so hit the mute button on the video, cue up the corresponding piece on In Motion #1, and things all fall into place. "Outer Space" and "Dream Work" are both based around two films by Peter Tscherkassky that turn clips of the 1982 horror b-movie The Entity into gristle-speckled, high-contrast black-and-white studies in decay, and the juxtapositions with the seizure-warning footage really draw out the menace in Chant and Concept's work. James Whitney's Lapis and its meditative, hypnotic, abstract psychedelic animation was originally soundtracked by 66-chic sitars, but Peralta's piece is a good way to draw out the film's more nuanced movements-- and the music's trippier elements. The continuous downward crowd-shot pan of Standish Lawder's Necrology finds the ideal accompaniment in the similar slow-motion descent of the Cinematic Orchestra's composition, "Manhatta" feels a lot less treacly and a lot more stirring when set to Paul Strand's silent document of New York City in 1921, and the rainfall study of Joris Ivens' Regen is a stirring inspiration for Grey Reverend's light-fingered guitar. The only piece that stumbles in juxtaposition with its inspiration is "Entr'acte", which tries to replace Erik Satie's lively, slyly comedic score to René Clair's Dadaist ballet intermission short with music too conventionally dramatic and stuffily dignified to fit the surrealist slapstick. But you could always save that one for dinner parties-- the rest do well being listened to with your eyes.
