The Sun City Girls and
J. Spaceman independently recorded the soundtrack-score for Mister Lonely, the 2008 film by the loopy (or visionary depending on your point of view) auteur
Harmony Korine (Gummo, Kids, Julien-Donkey Boy). The basic premise of the picture centers around a French
Michael Jackson impersonator -- yes, that's right,
the King of Pop himself -- who chances upon a secret society of other impersonators, or, as the film's press release depicts them, "surrogate stars" including Queen Elizabeth, Buckwheat, Charlie Chaplin,
Marilyn Monroe (of course),
Madonna,
the Three Stooges,
Shirley Temple, etc. Nice tracks, including four of the five opening cues, were recorded by
Spaceman with help from Tony Foster on lap steel, vibraphonist Tom Edwards, bassist
Richard Warren, and Tim Lewis, who triples on violin, flute, and clarinet. The Sun City Girls, who score 11 of these pieces, are the original trio with Richard and
Alan Bishop and the late Charles Gocher, making this one of his final appearances in the recording studio.
Eyvind Kang plays viola on a couple of their tracks and vocalist Jessica Kinney acts as a vocal chorus on one as well. Given that this is a
Korine production, it's already quite predictable that this music will be strange and dislocating, full of tense disquiet and speculative spaciness. It's easy to expect that from the SCG; it's one of the many things they did well, being musical terrorists.
Spaceman, on the other hand, is not even recognizable as himself here. His music ranges from simple bits of clunky, clomping noise to faux classical Baroque atrocities that are simple harmonic scalar works weaving together his own "understanding" of both
Purcell and
Debussy! New music types might enjoy this, and it may work well in the context of the anarchic cinema of
Korine, although it sounds nothing like the bracing black metal or hip-hop scores for
Korine's other films -- but they don't sound like one another, either. ~ Thom Jurek