Rat Film (Original Soundtrack)

Album review

At 36 years old, Dan Deacon is considered one of the leading composers of his generation. He started his career as a kind of talented one-man band (he played various instruments, such as the tuba and keyboard in many bands). Now, he is most of all known for being a prolific electro music wonder boy, especially during his outstanding live performances, in which the interaction with the audience plays an essential role. As for his studio albums, there are already eight of them. Let’s cite Spiderman And The Rings released by Wildfire Wildfire in 2007, as well as America released by Domino in 2012. Before Rat Film, he already tried his hand at being a movie composer for experimental films, including Francis Ford Coppola’s bold thriller, Twixt, in 2011. Theopolis Anthony’s documentary attempt explores with originality the complex social life in Baltimore. Such an original subject could only suit Dan Deacon, who has a field day experimenting in the most mad and joyful way. His audacity reaches new heights in tracks where the performance is entrusted to… rats! It’s the case of the opening track (Redlining),  in which the rodents “play” the Theremin, a primitive electronic instrument that was already the heyday of American cinema many decades ago thanks to some compositions from Miklós Rózsa, notably for Alfred Hitchcock. Here, we aren’t in the master of suspense’s avian world, but in the realm of rats, whose movements associated to the Theremin create a sequence of sounds and rhythms, reworked later by Deacon like MIDI samples. Just like this track, the soundtrack of Rat Film is filled with pieces whose execution and results are surprising. Let’s cite the horrific Video Game or even Harold’s Lament, in which Deacon plays with the strident sounds of a cello, but also with the cracks of an Ikea chair on which the instrumentalist is seated! But beside all that, Deacon grants himself moments whose sounds are more familiar, such as Pelican, where Steve Strohmeier’s electric guitar suffuses quiet improvisations on blues harmonies. And even if he’s an adept of the most insane quirkiness, the composer isn’t against depicting a scene literally. It’s the case with Harold, in which Dan Deacon illustrates a ping-pong game with a synthesizer quite simply evoking the sounds from the ball against the racket. One of a kind, this experimental and atmospheric soundtrack is the product of long work sessions in the studio, where the musicians’ improvisations combined to Deacon’s genius give birth to music whose freshness and audacity offer a stark contrast with the too-often formatted aesthetics of today’s film scores. © NM/Qobuz