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‘THE SHINING’

A smart, damaged, thoroughly freaked-out little kid riding his big wheel through a blood-soaked haunted house? Yeah, that sums up this band pretty well. The Shining is (possibly) the best and (even more possibly) the artiest horror flick of all time, and the hellish clatter of Krystof Penderecki’s soundtrack makes it so: a never-ending fount of paralyzing unease, and the nightmare fuel for everything from Jonny Greenwood’s abstract, visceral work for Paul Thomas Anderson movies to some murderous-sounding quasi-lullabies we could mention.

Avey Tare: This is like 11th or 12th grade. There was a time when Brian and I were on mushrooms and watched The Shining. And we just had this new epiphany about this deep connection between music and film, and just the way that soundtracks or pieces of music — like Krystof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima or something like that, it’s this brutal, weird, emotional, textural landscape. But put with film, with something like The Shining, it takes on this new meaning. There’s a part where they pass by this cow farm and it’s all gnarly, the cows getting slaughtered — like the humans getting slaughtered — and he plays all this cow screeching. I don’t feel like you notice some of the sounds the first time you watch it. The more you watch it, the more you see all this stuff happening. Sounds were used in a very cool way& #8212; these weird screeching industrial machines, but they could be acoustic instruments.

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