A Closer Listen
The most overused cliché in instrumental music is “the soundtrack to a movie that has never been made.” Emil Friis flips the script – literally – by commissioning filmmakers to produce short films for all fifteen tracks on Moving Images. At this website, one can track the progress of the films as they arrive. The tracks are purposely cinematic, sparking visual imagination, and filmmakers were given free rein to express their own readings of the sonic material.
Our favorite to date is Shaun Hart’s “Five Corners of Blue,” whose very title is open to interpretation. In less than three minutes, the music shifts between a myriad of moods, and is reflected in the direction. There’s love, danger, risk and a frisson of suspense. The cinematography is crisp and austere; we love the indulgence of including a tumbleweed. The thunderclouds are gathering; fate is coming. Or is it? Somehow the story grows deeper – quickly, because it has to – and creates a deeper emotional impact, borne on the strings and the mutual restraint of composer and filmmaker.
In contrast, Kevin Brooks’ mini-movie for the two-minute track “An Upward Motion” reflects the relationship between (human) dance and the dance of nature. Scenes shift as each piano phrase decays, releasing a different aspect of interspecies commonality. The tree becomes the dancer; the dancer becomes the tree. And in Jonathan Meyers’ “Through the Air,” the visuals are dominated by shades of deep sea blue – slightly ironic due to the fact that the earlier track is called “Five Corners of Blue” – the air connoting not only sea and sky, but the breath of the woodwinds. The organ is a grounding instrument, suggesting the sea bed, but the camera eventually surfaces in an array of bubbles and protrusions of watery sound (not present in the original track).
Those experiencing the album are invited to think about the ways in which sound sparks mental imagery, but there’s a second layer to such an invitation, as one might also ask if one’s range of associations grows limited once one associates a track with a short film. Perhaps it depends on just how indelible the images may be: for example, try playing the theme to Jaws and imagining anything other than a shark, or any song that Groot dances to without thinking of Groot.
For now, the remaining tracks remain aural experiences only. This being said, they are steeped in emotion, whether introspective or flamboyant, melancholy or illuminated. “Movement of Dawn” has a hesitant quality, each piano phrase punctuated by a short silence, as if one is looking toward the horizon repeatedly and then looking away. Here one might add a third quality, that of a track title to suggest an image. The tracks are as short as 1:10, and none top single length; they convey feelings while only briefly suggesting stories.
To this listener, “Spirit of the Mind” exudes a forlorn feeling, like that of a person left behind, while “Eternal Daydream” has the feel of a realization, an energizing revelation that leads a person past trauma and into the light. “Shape of Solace” is the closing of a chapter, a book, a relationship. The drone that shutters “Sunlight on the Beams of Hollow” suggests wonder and awe. The images are indeed moving, in both senses of the word. Did I get it “right?” The subsequent film releases may provide clues, but the answer is, “There is no right.” There is only the invitation to an unmapped form of synesthesia, sound evoking vision, word invoking sound, vision evoking word. (Richard Allen)
Fri Aug 29 00:01:40 GMT 2025