Solaris

by

Cliff Martinez

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Whatever you may think of Solaris the movie (the friends I saw it with were too busy hating it to even NOTICE it had a soundtrack), the original motion picture score is an amazing, hypnotic, deeply moving musical experience unlike any other you've had at the movies. Without any recognizable song structure or hummable melody line, composer Cliff Martinez has created a distinctive, haunting sound which stays with you for months after hearing it. Imagine the music from the train ride sequence in Risky Business played marimba-style on muted steel drums, with occasional waves of sweeping, weeping violins and/or horns for accent. The musical conceit running throughout seems to be a basso ostenuto of three ascending notes played over and over with driving urgency, holding the piece together, while steel drums dance, reverberate, and tilt liltingly through, around, and beyond it like a celestial light show.

To give just a little background for anyone who hasn't seen the movie, Solaris deals with the cost of love, the abuses we heap on each other in the name of love, and the price we'd pay to restore lost loves. Solaris is the name of a planet in deep space (covered by a sentient ocean, in the book) being explored some decades in our future by a crew whose mission is to determine if the rays given off by the planet can be used as an alternate source of fuel for a seriously energy-depleted Earth. A byproduct of the anomalous energy is that it can give physical form to your deepest, most private desire. In just about every case, that desire turns out to be a love that went wrong and ended in death, a relative spurned, a wife or lover rejected or neglected, who later died. Martinez does an incredible job of embodying all the different aspects of the story - the vast emptiness of deep space, the alien-ness of the planet, the tenderness and heartache that accompany self-discovery, and most importantly the poignancy of love lost, regained, lost once more...and perhaps regained one final time.

The tracks basically use three arrangements: the steel drum sound described above, a much slower-paced, lullaby-like arrangement using an instrument which sounds like a child's music box played backwards (sounding a lot like the intro of "Prayer for the Dying" by Seal, before the guitar kicks in), and a slightly more conventional arrangement using sustained minor or even dissonant chords of horns and woodwinds, reminiscent of the more ominous tracks of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Some, like "Will She Come Back" and "Don't Blow It," will amaze you with their ability to affect you with their careful, gentle wash of notes that build to a thrumming intensity, giving physical form (as does the anomalous planet in the movie) to both sadness and hope; even though the pieces were designed for specific sequences in the movie, they are universal enough for each listener to claim them as his own, calling up memories of loss and desire to "illustrate" each one.

I wish words could do this album justice, but that is its genius - it has to be heard to even begin to be appreciated. I usually forget the soundtrack of a movie five minutes after I leave the theatre, but this one stayed with me for months, prompting me to dodge into any [local stores]I passed in search of the CD (ultimately, I could only find it here on Amazon). It's rich enough to listen to attentively, yet ambient enough to be used as background music, or even (save for the more ominous selections) music to fall asleep to. If you saw the movie and remember even slightly noting how original the music was, or - like me - were unable to get it out of your head, by all means get this CD, you won't be disappointed.