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Column 16: BBC’s Drive Experiment Crashes & Burns

November 5, 2014

When I was a kid, I remember trying to explore everything my computer could do. A personal computer was still an exciting new technology and I had so many fresh tools at my disposal. But of all these tools I had to use, I enjoyed messing with none more than Windows Movie Maker. I still have fond memories of taking popular shows or movies I watched and crudely mashing them up with some of my favorite songs. I share this not to revel in nostalgia, but because that’s what BBC’s latest experiment reminded me of. In the last week, famous BBC radio DJ, Zane Lowe, premiered his rescored version of Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2009 film, Drive. The project overseen by Lowe earned the blessing of the film’s director and collected some of the UK’s biggest indie & electronic acts to create original music for the film. The original was already[...]

Column 14: The Heart-Pounding Intensity of The Knick

October 22, 2014

The Knick is the best show currently airing on TV. Well, after its season finale this past Friday, it’s technically on hiatus until 2015, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is a frenetically pulsating beam of television magic in an otherwise dull fall season. The show is truly a gritty, debris-covered gem mined from the depths of Steven Soderbergh’s directorial genius, making it the quintessence of the argument that television has surpassed the cinema in every way you can imagine. If one of the ways you’ve imagined happens to be the show’s music, then you’re absolutely right. Scored by Cliff Martinez (a frequent Soderbergh collaborator), the music’s electrified synthesizers and intense baselines wallop you out of the turn-of-the-century and transport you into some sort of 1980s control room where a drugged-up computer scientist is turning dials and hitting buttons with such fervor that you feel as if you’re[...]