PETER BRODERICK - Music For Confluence

It's nothing new for Peter Broderick to try his hand at conceptual works meant to accompany other art forms; but while his previous forays into "music for" were tied to abstract art installations or contemporary dance pièces ("Music For Falling From Trees"), with "Music For Confluence" the prolific composer - Danish-born, raised in the United States and currently based in Berlin - has for the first time crafted a sonic commentary for actual footage.

"Confluence" - indeed - is a documentary film directed by Vernon Lott and Jennifer Anderson, centred on a series of murders and mysterious disappearances of young women in a confined area of Idaho in the early 1980s.

Broderick's music follows the footage step by step, fuelling the murky atmosphere of the narrative right from the start, through a tonally consistent register - aided by the device of a few recurring musical themes - yet reshaped according to the composer's varied sensibilities, now acoustic, now more markedly ambient.

The restless, bucolic contemplation of the opening track "The Valley Itself", with its guitar fragments and Arone Dyer's abstract vocalisations, sets the tone for the whole work, which then proceeds through the spectral resonance of piano notes in "We Didn't Find Anything", the cinematic solemnity of "She Just Quit Coming To School" and "It Wasn't A Deer Skull", and the trembling reverbs of "What Was Found".

Against a backdrop of largely concise tracks, where he allows himself a broader expressive scope, Broderick develops compositions running close to five minutes, placed in the second half of the record and themselves stretched between hazy ambient evanescence ("He Was Inside That Building"), slow unfurling acoustic picking ("Until The Person Is Aprehended") and measured rhythmic surges with hints of noisy derailment ("The Person Of Interest"), all of which heighten the drama of the concept.

The one track that stands somewhat apart from the rest is the piece specifically "commissioned" by Vernon Lott for the film's closing credits, which also closes out the tracklist of the soundtrack: "Old Time" is a burst of serenity in the form of a delicate song for guitar and violin, its intimate, muffled atmosphere recalling the singer-songwriter Broderick of the wonderful "How They Are".

The fragmentary nature of the work, and the fact that it's being experienced apart from the images it was written for, certainly don't make it easy to assess as a whole; yet even on "Music For Confluence" Peter Broderick manages to deliver moments of crystalline class and an artistic maturity that never stops amazing, given the versatility and sheer frequency of his output.

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27/11/2011