Browsing in a record shop one day, you might come across a CD called Ticker. It’s an album-length recording of a ticking clock. The tick is fed through an echo, and the echoes get faster or slower depending on the body temperature of the artist, Alvin Lucier. He made the recording with thermal sensors attached to his body. Sometimes, perhaps to avoid charges of anthropocentrism, he puts the sensors on a potted plant instead.

This is sound art. Normally, I prefer to listen to music. Shostakovich, Rage Against the Machine, Ibizan trance. Just listening to interesting sounds has struck me as the sort of thing an ultra-stoned hippy might do, pushing a door back and forth for hours and swaying in addled wonder to the melody of the creaks. Continued →

It is Valentine’s day, 1968. In a hospital in Wimbledon, London, a baby daughter is born to Lord and Lady Henshingly-Croft. The girl has a drawerful of silver spoons in her little mouth. Between the ages of three and 11, she is privately tutored at home; she then attends Wimbledon High School for Girls and Gordonstoun. At the latter, she discovers a passion for rock-climbing in the mountains of Scotland. (She also takes up shooting, but is soon banned for showing “too keen an interest”.) By the time she is 18, everyone can see she has a wild streak, but her parents believe that she can be thoroughly civilised – and eventually married off to the Earl of Farringdon – after three years at a Swiss finishing school.

While in Switzerland, however, the young woman takes to extreme skiing, and spends a holiday pursuing the sport in the Himalayas. On the return journey, her plane crashes deep in the mountains, and she is the only passenger left alive. Somehow she manages to survive for two weeks until she staggers into a mountain village. By this time, the course of her life has changed. She has learned that she only feels truly alive when travelling alone. Lara Croft has decided to become an adventuress. Continued →

In the 1950s, people imagined that by now we would all be floating around in flying cars and eating nutrient pills for lunch, but would still be communicating by radio telephone or by firing paper messages through a network of pneumatic tubes. One thing no one foresaw was the extraordinary omnipresence of the screen in modern life. Everywhere we look there is another glowing alphanumeric display pregnant with the promise of instantaneous oracular gratification. What has happened? Continued →

Great literature has always been traduced and eviscerated on screen. Yet the peaks of imaginative writing seem to represent an irresistible challenge for film-makers. Now Dutch director Marleen Gorris, who previously adapted Mrs Dalloway with Vanessa Redgrave, has taken on a book by the 20th century’s greatest sorcerer in prose, Vladimir Nabokov. Many film-makers have tried to mine the wily Russian, and this new attempt revives the question: can Nabokov ever be filmed successfully? Continued →

When the artistic history of the 20th century comes to be written, one remarkable development will stand out. That is the rise of the middleman. As our culture became ever more mediated, we made the mistake of bestowing the aura of artistic genius upon the mediators themselves. The people closest at hand – musical conductors, theatre directors, DJs – became the objects of the awe and admiration that was rightly due to the creative spirits who built the works in the first place.

The most glaring example of this is the invention of the conductor. In the early years of the 20th century, Mahler and Toscanini battled it out for supremacy in Europe, while Theodore Thomas established in America a new template for the conductor as the permanent arbiter of musical taste with the Chicago Symphony. Soon the conductor was not merely a hired hand whose job was to beat time, but a suffering genius swaying in creative ecstasy on the podium. Toscanini, von Karajan, Bernstein: these were the new musical heroes. Continued →

What does a vampire sound like? According to Philip Glass, the undead’s aural analogue is a quivering nest of minor arpeggios, pizzicati and dramatic swoops. Glass has written a new score for one of the mothers of all horror movies, Tod Browning’s 1931 version of Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. Glass is a name in his own right, of course, but in this, he is only the latest in a long line of film composers who have experimented with the music of fear.

Music is especially important in films that are meant to scare us because the soundtrack can slip past the intellect’s guard and act directly on the reptilian brain. Music as a powerful mood-inducer, of course, is an idea that has been around ever since early man started stretching animal skins over wooden bowls and getting off his face on qhat, and in Plato’s Republic, Socrates and Glaucon earnestly discuss the possibly chaotic mental influence of certain musical scales. Continued →