Metropolis Metropolis

Album review

The obsession continues. Following on from 2000 and 2010, Jeff Mills presents his third soundtrack for the film Metropolis in 2023, a work whose lessons he considers as relevant as ever, almost a century after its original release (1927). Detroit's techno wizard sees Fritz Lang's dystopia as a warning to our increasingly digital world, reminding us that in the film technology is merely a tool in the hands of humans responsible for the dehumanisation of society - and that it is up to them alone to bring it to an end. Rather than producing a classic soundtrack, which follow the plot of the film title by title, he conceived this version as a “symbiotic mix of compositions that provides a nuanced representation of the plot”. 

After the 2000 soundtrack, composed from the point of view of the spectator watching the screen, and the 2010 mise en abyme (from the point of view of the characters in the film watching the spectator watching the film), this soundtrack takes the point of view of the machines, composed as an "electronic symphony" played by an orchestra of machines led by Jeff Mills himself. He delivers 75 minutes of pieces that are in turn hypnotic, dreamlike, political, cosmic, apocalyptic and liturgical. It’s an artistic feat. © Smaël Bouaici/Qobuz