Babel: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
From AwardAnnals
| Album: | Babel: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack |
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| Artist: | Gustavo Santaolalla |
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| Label: | Concord Records |
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A global story needed a global soundtrack, but Alejandro González Iñárritu didn't want a hodge podge of folk music or songs that sounded like incidental music for a National Geographic special. Iñárritu, Santaolalla, Anibal Kerpel (Composer and Music Editor) and Lynn Fainchtein (Music Supervisor) locked themselves up in a recording studio both in Marrakech and Tijuana, where they listened to and recorded the music of the Gnawa and other traditional Arab musicians in Morocco, and delved into various Norteño sounds in Tijuana. In Japan, musician, producer and DJ Shinichi Osawa and musician, producer Cornelius guided Iñárritu and his collaborators through the sights and sounds of Tokyo at night. The resulting soundtrack takes us on a journey with no beginning or end, with music that illuminates the film as well as the creative process behind it. “Gustavo found the musical and spiritual DNA of the film playing the oud with his sensitive fingertips, producing the mesmerizing sounds of the scored tracks in these CDs,” Iñárritu says. “I hope when you listen you can feel the distant winds of the planet caressing your skin.”
Santaolalla's evocative score for Babel is complimented by tracks from some of the best-known artists in the world of Japanese, Tex-Mex and North African music including music composed by Gustavo Santaolalla (Brokeback Mountain) with additional music by such esteemed artists as Fat Boy Slim (The Joker), Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Sylvian and more.
Reviews
Amazon.com
As its title suggests, Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film revolves around the transcultural difficulties of human communication. But the linguistic dysfunction that drives the film’s characters towards causal connection and inevitable tragedy has paradoxically inspired just the opposite on this adventurous musical mélange of a soundtrack. The meditative, often hypnotic fretboard inventions of Iñárritu’s previous soundtrack collaborator, Argentine composer Gustavo Santaolalla (a 2005 Oscar winner for Brokeback Mountain), serve as the restless soul of interlocking plots in the film, the final chapter of a fatalistic trilogy that also includes the Santaolalla-scored Amores Perros and 21 Grams.
But on this expanded, double-disc collection, the South American composer’s culture-bending film cues (including mastery of indigenous Arab stringed instruments and incorporating field recordings of Moroccan tribal music) also serve as artistic axes, reflective anchor points for a pop collection that’s as ambitious and far-ranging as the film itself. While the “music from and inspired by” tag often indicates cynical record company marketing schemes, here it’s an invitation to transcultural musical adventure that links Santaolalla’s North African musical conjuring with the contemporary styles of Japan (the atmospherics of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Susumu Yolota, Shinichi Osawa’s sly Earth, Wind & Fire/Fatboy Slim mashup, the teen pop of Takashi Fujii’s “Oh My Juliet”) and Tijuana (a generous sampling of effusive Norteño that includes Los Incomparables, Daniel Luna, and Agua Caliente). —Jerry McCulley
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In the remote sands of the Moroccan desert, a rifle shot rings out—detonating a chain of events that will link an American tourist couple’s frantic struggle to survive, two Moroccan boys involved in an accidental crime, a nanny illegally crossing into Mexico with two American children, and a Japanese teen rebel whose father is sought by the police in Tokyo. Separated by clashing cultures and sprawling distances, each of these four disparate groups of people are nevertheless hurtling towards a shared destiny of isolation and grief. In the course of just a few days, they will each face the dizzying sensation of becoming profoundly lost - lost in the desert, lost to the world, lost to themselves - as they are pushed to the farthest edges of confusion and fear as well as to the very depths…
