25th July 2024
Christopher Nosnibor
The art world is not so much a desert as a breakers’ yard, stacked to the sky with abandoned and aborted projects, works which were commissioned and shelved or otherwise dropped, canned, kicked into touch. The endless hours spent on projects which have never seen the light of day hardly bear thinking about. A career in the arts is likely to be one dominated by failure over success, even for a successful creator. But what is success? Artistic success and commercial success exist in different spheres, and while the world at large seems to judge more or less anything by the measures of the latter, one should ask why this us. Units shifted, radio plays, streams on Spotify, these are the metrics of success, based on the monetisation of art. Something is simply not right.
Ian Williams’ latest release is a product of failure. Le Mystère Lucie (Dossier Secret) (that’s Codename Lucy (Spies Against Nazism)’, a companion piece to the recently-released Le Mystère Lucie (Des Espions Contre Le Nazisme), his recent soundtrack album of music for the 2023 French documentary Le Mystère Lucie (Des Espions Contre Le Nazisme) / Codename Lucy (Spies Against Nazism).
As the accompanying blurb expounds, ‘it features music composed for but ultimately not used in the documentary, which was originally conceived as a 75 minute film but eventually released as a 52 minute TV broadcast. It seemed a pity not to make these additional themes and sketches available, so here they are, another collection of World War II spy music – melodic, electronic, orchestral, tuneful, abrasive, with both releases showcasing Williams’ knack of fusing big tunes with occasional blasts of industrial noise.’
Grand, bold, epic, expansive… these adjectives give a hint of the cinematic compositions n offer here. Being designed as a soundtrack, the album’s seventeen compositions are brief – largely under three minutes – and gentle, employing smooth synth bass and conjuring an atmosphere which is accessible to the ear. The tracks blur into one another with great rapidity, as one would expect for a soundtrack, where the segments flow with the scenes.
Le Mystère Lucie (Dossier Secret) is rich in mood and atmosphere, as befits its subject. There’s not much industrial noise present here but string-soaked cinematic sweep abound. Le Mystère Lucie (Dossier Secret) feels filmic, it builds drama and layers of simmering tension, as well as lakes of brooding darkness and ripples of uneasiness. It’s an accomplished score, and one which most certainly was too good to go to waste.
AA
Aural Aggravation 