WICKED BLOOD SCORE COMPOSED BY ELIA CMIRAL
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THE GLORIOUS CORNER
Story By: G. H. HARDING
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| Colin Firth |
WICKED BLOOD --- Varèse Sarabande Records has released the Wicked Blood – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack as part of their Limited Edition series. The soundtrack features an original score composed by Elia Cmiral (Splinter, Atlas Shrugged).
“Wicked Blood is my third collaboration with director Mark Young,” said Cmiral. “Mark is very sensitive for music, puts a great deal of importance on the score and has always a clear vision what he needs from music for his movie. The movie is set in an unspecified location of the American South so it was naturally I was looking for inspiration and ideas there. Mark and I we felt we want a strong emotional and contemporary score with southern flavors but without imitating the local music styles."
Born in Czechoslovakia, Cmiral attended USC's Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television program. Soon after graduating, Cmiral scored his first American feature, Apartment Zero, starring Colin Firth. Over the next decade, he continued building a reputation for himself in Sweden and in America. His musical style combines contemporary electronics with modern orchestra, joining cutting edge technology and production with evocative and haunting melodic themes. Elia scored the first season of Don Johnson's TV series Nash Bridges. In 1998, he scored his first studio feature, John Frankenheimer's suspense thriller Ronin, which earned him the Movieline Young Hollywood Award for Best Soundtrack of 1998.
To date, Elia has written nearly forty scores for independent films, TV and major studios including Stigmata, Wrong Turn, Journey To The End Of The Night, and the Pulse trilogy.
“The poetic opening title (on Wicked) felt as an emotional key to the score and it contains two important themes I used throughout the whole score. The music for the string quartet opens the movie and also closes it in the end. It feels very right to close the circle of the whole movie with the same music.”
MICKY'S MAIL --- Monkee-Micky Dolenz was featured in Saturday’s Daily Mail in their My Haven section, which features celebrities at home. Here’s the link.
Via author Mark Bego, who wrote the 1993 book I’m A Believer: My Life of Monkees, Music and Madness with Dolenz: “What a great article about Monkees iconic star Micky Dolenz. One forgets how influential the music of The Monkees still is and continues to be. Last night I was watching the recent remake of the film Straw Dogs. In the very beginning of the film, its two stars are seen in a convertible sports car singing to a song on the radio. The song they we're singing to? Micky Dolenz's unmistakable voice on the song 'Goin' Down!' And it still sounds amazing after all these years.”
Bego's tome with Glen Campbell-daughter Debby is out, finally, on September 25. Whew!
GENESIS LIVE … AGAIN --- When Genesis released Genesis: 1970-1975, its third boxed set of studio albums, last fall, keyboardist Tony Banks told Billboard.com that "The next logical thing to do would be something with the live albums. We have a few of those, and we have quite a bit of stuff in the vaults that could be added to flesh things out a bit."
That will happen on Sept. 29, when Rhino releases Genesis Live 1973-2007, a 10-disc set featuring five of the group's six official live albums -- it will include a spot for last year's Live Over Europe album from the 2007 reunion tour -- along with a wealth of unreleased material. Included in the latter will be Live at the Rainbow 1973, an oft-bootlegged nine-song collection (portions of which have been previously released) recorded during October of that year in London after the release of Selling England By the Pound (still one the group’s best-ever efforts).
The 1973 release Genesis Live will be bolstered by five tracks from The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway tour recorded in January of 1975 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.
Seconds Out from 1977 will remain intact, while the version of 1982's Three Sides Live in the box will feature the live tracks from the U. K. edition of the album -- "One For the Vine," "Fountain of Salmacis" and a medley of "It" and "Watcher of the Skies" -- rather than the studio songs that were part of the U. S. package. The box also reconciles the two versions of The Way We Walk, which had been sub-titled The Shorts (1992) and The Long (1993), and combines them in the original concert sequence.
Delving into the backlog of live recordings may also hasten the release of individual shows via Genesis' web site, something the group promised when it launched the portal several years back.
"We still talk about that," Banks acknowledged. "We will get to it. I don't know when, but I promise you we'll do it. We've pulled tapes from all sorts of areas, and we've got board mixes from quite an early era, so that will be quite fun for some people." Rutherford added that, "There's some quite nice things there, I think. It just requires energies from someone to pull it all together and put it all out in a way that makes some sort of sense."
As someone who worked with the group, right after Peter Gabriel exited (as well as with Charisma Records’ late-great Tony Sratton-Smith who first released the group on his label), all these re-issues are nice and certainly historical … but, how about some new recordings? I can appreciate living off past work more than anyone, but the real deal would indeed be something new. I'd love to see Phil Collins come out of Civil War-land and get back to the skins?
It could happen – several weeks back Collins himself said it might be nice to do something new … and, could we even get Gabriel to appear? Who knows?
CLOSING NOTES --- Here we go again. After the huge Genesis announcement last Friday, which turned out to be nothing more than a new career retrospective three-CD set, we are being teased about a mega announcement by Prince set for tomorrows Good Morning America. A life-long fan, I caught him two years back at NYC's Madison Square Garden (performing in the round no less) and it was one of the best live shows I'd ever seen. Live, there's certainly no match other than perhaps Bruce Springsteen, but his recording career has suffered since the 80's. Here's hoping for a true mega-moment. Bets are on a release date for the long-in-coming Plectrum Electrum album but, who knows. Maybe he'll go the Genesis route and announce a new greatest hits collection .... or, that he's adopting a new name. Stay tuned ...
SIGHTINGS --- Mamie Gummer (Streep) at a Yoga People in Brooklyn Heights; Writer Marc Eliot at Palm West in NYC; PR-kingpin David Salidor celebrating his 60th at the Nomad restaurant on lower-Broadway.
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