Satellite is the soundtrack to the film by director Jeff Winner, based and shot in New York City, and currently on the edge of breakout success as it garners favorable reviews at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival.
For the music, Winner relied on the local talent of Vered Ronen whose dreamy, wistful music creates a “sad, yet hopeful score for the movie with slightly out of key, unaffected piano playing, and elementary lyrics”. (from the directors statement at Gigantic Pictures and the songs of the band Calla.
The CD is a collection of songs that range from Calla’s sole inclusion “So Far, So What”, (a combination of emo-rock and swirling cinematics that wouldn’t be out of place where the songs by The Groop appear in Midnight Cowboy), to tracks like Inouk’s “No Danger” (a cross between David Byrne and a mix of the Byrds and R.E.M., you know that sound), The Cloud Room’s “The Sunlight Song” (a breathy track in the style of elbow or coldplay at their less anthemic, and Ezekial Honig’s “Falling Down” (which breakbeats unassumingly along in the manner or Fourtet or The Album Leaf). The cd is rounded out by the uptempo sounds of Some Actions’s “Some Action” and the Clash-y “We’ll Make A Lover Of You” by Les Savy Fav.
As contemporary film (and more recently television) has evolved to be musically reliant on well placed songs as much as original composition to underscore dramatic situations, the necessity of directors to collaborate with music supervisors and composers (most consistently successfully with Wes Anderson, Mark Mothersbaugh and Randall Poster on the films Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic) to create a tapesty from a variety of sources that both contributes to a film and results in a listenable soundtrack cd has become something difficult to achieve. As a soundtrack, if nothing else, it seems that the team behind Satellite have managed to do that.
Satellite follows the model of Rushmore by including both songs and commissioned music in alternating fashion (though in this case Calla and Ronen are afforded only one cut apiece, and both are songs) and this approach does succeed in creating something engaging and consistent enough to be enjoyed in it’s own right (as opposed to something like City Of Angels or any number of other soundtracks with 10 rocking songs followed by 15 minutes of orchestral filmscore which is not inferior in any way, but also, by design, not able to be appreciated in the same manner).
A cd like this can serve as in introduction to several artists worthy of further exploration (and hopefully all readily accessible on various places on the internet) or to make busy modern-type people without a lot of spare time seem like they have the combination of good taste and patience to make good mixed cd’s.
Also, as New York enjoys a renaissance of late with more production work on all levels occurring locally, from smaller films like this or (Tribeca entry of 2004) Randel Cole’s 2B Perfectly Honest right up to Big Budget Musical Extravaganzas like The Producers, the more exposure that up and coming artists like Ronen and Calla can enjoy from being part of such films as Satellite the better.
More info on Calla the multi-faceted Vered Ronen can be found at www.callamusic.com and www.veredmusic.com , respectively. |