Last night, a number of musicblogs reported that portions of Jonny Greenwood’s score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Bloodwere streaming on a Paramount Vantage promotional site. So this morning, we clicked the link, followed the “Score” tab…and found nothing. The streams are nowhere to be found, the page in question blank but for the teaser that something unspecified will be “coming soon.” Did traffic from Pitchfork overwhelm the Paramount Vantage servers? What else could have happened in the intervening 14 hours to make the stream disappear? Oh, wait — it is Halloween. Spooky!
Anyway, all is not lost. The Playlist has been on this soundtrack like John Edwards on Hillary Clinton’s inconsistencies. They’ve got the track listing for the Blood soundtrack, which reveals that two of the “songs” used in the film are excerpts recycled from Greenwood’s 18-minute orchestral composition, Popcorn Superhet Receiver, which was commissioned by the BBC in 2006. They have a link to a Real Audio download of that on the BBC’s website.
Meanwhile, The Bathysphere apparently had a chance to listen to the stream before it vanished from the Vantage site. They point to this episode of Henry Rollins’ IFC show, in which the director says he listened to “a lot of crazy Polish pirate music” like KrzysztofPenderecki while writing the film (Rollins does a wide-eyed double-take at this tidbit that’s pretty priceless). The Bathysphere points to this MP3 of Penderecki’s Threnody To The Victims Of Hiroshima, which was also used in Children of Men, and which sounds *a lot* like the music that backed the twenty-minute reel of Bloodshown at Telluride.
In anticipation of seeing Anton Corbijn’s Control at Toronto next week (FYI, that film took a couple of prizes at the Edinburgh Film Festival this past weekend), I’ve been watching some of Corbijn’s music videos on YouTube and iFilm. In the late 80s/early 90s, Corbijn was to go-to guy for Euro-bands looking for something grainy and either black-and-white or in washed-out color, in which they could sulk bitterly whilst stalking around either city or countryside, surrounded with what looked like low-rent Helmut Newton girls in various 80s costumes, and eventually resolve some of the underlying tension and hostility in some suggestion of light S & M.
Henry Rollins is picking up where Bob Hope left off. In the clip above, from the IFC special Henry Rollins Uncut From Israel, the actor/punk rock legend/TV host describes the experience of visiting wounded soldiers as a representative of the USO. The special aired on IFC several months ago, but I stumbled across the clip again today whilst reading Chris Catania’s lengthy interview with Rollins at PopMatters, in which Rollins discusses Iraq, Iran, the internet, and aging out of culture.
UPDATE: The clip described above has been removed from YouTube. I’ve replaced it with a an interview with Rollins about his experiences touring with Black Flag and traveling as a spoken word artist in Iran.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Last night, a number of 
