#randall poster

[nofatclips]

On My Knees by U.N.K.L.E. (featuring Michael Kiwanuka) from the album Music inspired by the film Roma

[sound-notes]

This episode is 'For The Birds' : All Songs Considered

A massive new collection of more than 240 songs and spoken word recordings — all about birds — features work from Andrew Bird, Kamasi Washin

[rjzimmerman]

A Boxed Set for the Birds Hopes to Save Them, Too

A star-studded, 242-track trove of songs and poems inspired by birdsong is the latest project in a series of releases raising awareness about its own threatened sources.

My theme of posting today seems to be birds. This post, at least three others. I started casually watching birds right after I retired, and then with some increasing intensity during the pandemic. But the watching part really took off right after my heart surgery, when I would look out the window or sit outside, while recuperating, and watch and listen to the birds. Then I got into photography (a good thing, because I was ignoring it in self-pity) and have to have my Nikon or my iPhone ready and focused (or the app open) so I can grab a photo. Then I downloaded on my iPhone the Merlin app from Cornell, which tells you what bird you hear or see. I’m now hooked.

Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:

Randall Poster had never noticed the songbirds of the Bronx, where he has lived for most of his 60 years, until people started to quiet down earlier each day as the first pandemic winter approached in 2020. He admitted with a wink during a recent video call that his childhood knowledge of birds was limited to, “You know, Baltimore Orioles and the Philadelphia Eagles.”

But when Poster — a powerhouse music supervisor for filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Todd Haynes and Wes Anderson — began talking about the birds he could hear, an environmentalist pal offered grim news. Human interactions alone possibly kill over 500 million birds each year in the United States. According to a 2018 report, one in eight of the world’s bird species now risk extinction. Common chemicals can ruin the very songs Poster suddenly loved. These statistics sparked an idea: What if he harnessed a quarter-century of industry connections into a fund-raiser for bird conservation, integrating the melodies he heard?

On Friday, Poster will release the first volume of “For the Birds,” a star-studded, 242-track collection of original songs and readings inspired by or incorporating birdsong; later this year, it will be bundled as a 20-LP boxed set to benefit the National Audubon Society. The project sprawled, he said, because birds seemed to be on everyone’s mind. “People were spending a lot of time looking out the window,” said Poster, one among the legion of bird-watching initiates in the pandemic. “There was so much that was unknown and unknowable that we were comforted by the fact nature was still doing its thing.”

“For the Birds” unspools like a version of a soundtrack Poster might design for an Anderson film, cavorting through moods and styles at will. There are elegies and aubades, fiddle tunes and field recordings. A radiant electronic trance from Dan Deacon and a Beatles interpretation from Elvis Costello share space with a Jonathan Franzen reading; Laurie Anderson, Alice Coltrane (remixed), Yoko Ono and a reading from Wendell Pierce open separate LPs.

[affection-and-queries]

Liner notes to the “Grand Budapest Hotel” soundtrack (ABKCO, 2014):

Zauerli: a measured, lingering type of Swiss yodeling featured in Werner Herzog’s mesmerizing film HEART OF GLASS (the movie where he hired a hypnotist to put the cast and crew into a trance each day, but then he fired the hypnotist after the week and took over the job of entrancing everybody himself).

Cymbalom: a variation on the hammer-dulcimer mostly identified with Hungarian/Romani folk music, expanded and refined into a concert instrument. It can be played very fast and wild, but can also sound elegiac and nostalgic.

Balalaika: the three-stringed, triangular, Russian form of the mandolin. In an orchestral setting, a large group of balalaikas creates an expansive, humming, winter-fantasy wall-of-sound.

Alpenhorn: traditionally, the most efficient way to communicate from one mountain village to another. They are usually about eight feet long.

Gregorian Chant: at a certain point in our story, we find ourselves in a monastery above a ski resort.

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL takes place in an imaginary country in Mittel Europe about a hundred years ago. We always thought of this region as being a bit Czech, a bit Hungarian, a bit Polish, a bit Russia, a bit German  – and also a little bit 1930’s movie-studio in Culver City. We started, however, in Paris, with our gifted French composer Alexandre Desplat, who incorporated all the sounds and forms above to make what we called “Zubrowkian” music: something vaguely familiar (Alexandre’s music voice is always unmistakable), but nevertheless not quite like anything else.

A few discoveries Randall Poster and I gathered together which helped to inspire our score and colored the atmosphere of our movie:

Appenzeller Zäuerli by the Öse Schuppel Group

Balalaika Favorites by the Osipov State Russian Folk Orchestra

The performances of the great Zimbalist Mr. Gianni Lincan

We also owe special thanks to our arranger/conductor Mark Graham and our music editor Yann McCullough for their very important contributions to this musical project. 

wes anderson

[affection-and-queries]

Liner notes to the “Fantastic Mr. Fox” soundtrack (ABKCO, 2009):

My first plan for Fantastic Mr. Fox was to commission an operetta and use its music as our score. I was excited about this idea. Our own operetta. Maybe it would even be performed independently of the film one day? Randall Poster and I started listening to Gilbert and Sullivan. In fact, we listened to every operetta we could get our hands on, repeatedly – and then we began to ask ourselves, “What was, supposedly, so great about operetta, in the first place, and why are we doing this?” Randall came up with a variation: old English dancehall standards, a genre the existence of which I had not been previously aware. This held our interest very briefly. Next came folk music from Scotland and Ireland, then bluegrass, then a vast catalogue of “jug band” records. We also spent several months researching the history of children’s music. I think the meandering might have been the result of the fact that it took us ten years to make the film. Eventually, our soundtrack included Davy Crockett, Burl Ives, The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, Georges Delerue, and Bobby Fuller (whom Marshall Crenshaw describes as “the most famous rock star ever to be murdered by gangsters”)  –  plus our friend Jarvis Cocker who wrote a wonderful song that became the animated centerpiece of the story. You probably needed to be there with us from the beginning to follow our train of thought.  

But somehow Alexandre Desplat did just that. He wrote a score in his studio in Montparnasse (which I am told was formerly the sculptor Brancusi’s atelier) that seemed to combine every influence that we ever contemplated and then filtered them all through his own exceedingly refined and unique musical perspective. The result is something delicate and lyrical –  yet grand. It is not particularly like anything else I can put my finger on. (He also taught me about tea, as he is something of an expert in this area, as well, and keeps various vintages on hand from Taiwan and Bhutan and Upper Cambodia). 

He conducted with the puppets on the stand beside him at Abbey Road Studios in London  –  as you can see here.  

– Wes Anderson 2009

[affection-and-queries]

Liner notes to the “Royal Tenenbaums” soundtrack (Hollywood Records, 2001):

This movie was my third experience with the composer Mark Mothersbaugh and I have come to look forward to this phase of the film-making process very much. Mark works in a large, round, fluorescent green building on Sunset Boulevard which strongly resembles a flying saucer, and he is surrounded by a highly complex staff. Dan Ping manages the finances, and always seems to be just returning from the desert (where she attends rituals of some kind) with a racially new hairstyle. Bob Casale, one of Mark’s Devo colleagues, engineers the recording sessions with the confidence of someone who has had beer bottles thrown at him onstage, and who has thrown them back. There is also Josh, who resembles a young Bob Dylan; Albert, who was married (and divorced) twice to the same girl by age 27; Van, Stacy, Michelle, plus Mark’s restauranteur friend Fred, his girlfriend/agent Anita, and brother Bob, who is usually seen sitting on the curb outside the studio smoking a cigar and reading the business section of the L.A. Times. The operation is known as Mutato Muzika, which I think is Esperanto, and it provides a very stimulating creative atmosphere. Our music supervisor Randy Poster describes Mark’s music as, “charmed, magical and sort of innocent,” and I think that also describes the feeling you get when you work with Mark at his studio. I hope you enjoy the record.

– wes anderson.

[wrtu-blog]

‘Vinyl’ Music Supervisor Randall Poster On Martin Scorsese’s Hidden Logic And Finding The Sound Of 1973

‘Vinyl’ Music Supervisor Randall Poster On Martin Scorsese’s Hidden Logic And Finding The Sound Of 1973

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Music often plays an important role in a TV show, but when you’ve got Martin Scorsese producing a show about the record industry in 1973, music’s going to play an even bigger part. HBO’s new series, Vinyl (available to stream on HBO Now), stars Bobby Cannavale as record mogul Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale) amidst the glory days of rock and roll’s excess as he’s trying to reinvent…

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[lakeshorerecords]

The Nice Guys: Score Album Feat. John Ottman & David Buckley Coming Soon, Film Stars Russell Crowe And Ryan Gosling

The Nice Guys: Score Album Feat. John Ottman & David Buckley Coming Soon, Film Stars Russell Crowe And Ryan Gosling

Lakeshore Records will release the score album to The Nice Guys, starring Academy Award® winner Russell Crowe (Gladiator, Man of Steel) and Academy Award® nominee Ryan Gosling (Half Nelson, The Big Short).  The album features score by award-winning composers John Ottman (The Usual Suspects, X-Men 2) and David Buckley (The Good Wife, The Town).  Lakeshore previously announced the various artists…

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