Parasite, the seventh feature film by Korean director Bong Joon Ho, premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, where it took the coveted Palme d'Or for best film in competition. Since then, it has become the most critically acclaimed film of the year. For the film's bracingly original score, Bong turned to Jung Jae Il, who brings the world of Parasite to life with plaintive piano and stirring strings.
Silent Hill Sounds Box is a collection of the Silent Hill game soundtracks.
Strings played at the bridge in streaking glissandi. Atonal clusters, filled in down to quarter-tones. Thundering piano chords. And what horror score is complete without the standard tool of surprise, the orchestra hit? These elements, in part derived from the early work of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, which was itself featured prominently by Stanley Kubrick in The Shining, have become staples of horror scoring. While some of these elements appear in Akira Yamaoka's scores for the Silent Hill series, he focuses more on slowly building and maintaining an unsettling atmosphere than on startling the audience, much like the games themselves. The music is not only atypical as game music, but also atypical as horror music, and while it manifests elements of various genres such as trip-hop, industrial, and hard rock from time to time…
In 2013, David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label released Who is William Onyeabor?, a compilation of the obscure, but increasingly influential Nigerian musician William Onyeabor. Now (in 2014) follows a 9xCD box set that collects the entirety of Onyeabor’s recorded output.
After Neil Young left the California folk-rock band Buffalo Springfield in 1968, he slowly established himself as one of the most influential and idiosyncratic singer/songwriters of his generation. Young's body of work ranks second only to Bob Dylan in terms of depth, and he was able to sustain his critical reputation, as well as record sales, for a longer period of time than Dylan, partially because of his willfully perverse work ethic…
Like Nico, Astrud Gilberto's everywoman voiced has always had a polarizing effect on critics and fans alike. While her take on bossa nova is less than reverent and decidedly lightweight, the warmth and approachability she brings to each performance is stunning. Verve's lovingly compiled - and blissfully affordable - Astrud Gilberto's Finest Hour is as solid a collection of her heady mixture of samba, jazz and pop as you're likely to find. Twenty songs, including the classic "Girl From Ipanema," wash in like waves from the warmest of oceans, carrying with them the soft, reverb-drenched soundtrack to summer. If the tropical heat of "Berimbau," the lazy and lonely pulse of Burt Bacharach's "Trains and Boats and Planes" and the upbeat swing of "Wish Me a Rainbow" don't instantly take the drudgery of your day away, then consider yourself hopelessly bitter.