Details:
- Film: Existenz
- Soundtrack composer: Howard Shore
- Original year of release: 1999
- Number of tracks: 20
- Soundtrack duration: 46 mins 38 secs
- Tracks with vocals/distracting aspects: None
- Film score duration (with distracting tracks removed): 46 mins 38 secs
- Suggested suitable book genres: Thrillers, horrors, sci-fi, honestly just about anything!
DLS Summary:
For the purpose of music for reading a thriller or horror to, this is as near to perfect background music as you can get. Each track provides layers of strings, gradually escalating before deescalating, like waves on an orchestral shore. An orchestral Howard Shore! Sorry…I so had to!
Anyway, there’s nothing in this film score that’ll take you out of your book. It’s exactly what you want for an atmospheric backdrop, without being too delicate and quiet to not mask any noise around you (say during a rush hour commute). For putting on in the background just at home, well, it might create a bit of a tense and almost creepy atmosphere. So, yeah, maybe just leave it for reading.
DLS Review:
The soundtrack kicks off with a wonderfully atmospheric strings piece, setting a backdrop absolutely perfectly for reading a whole variety of different genres with the music in the background – from thrillers, to horror, to sci-fi. It’s a delicately and deliberately slow building up of the orchestral strings that’s so fitting for reading to.
Track two feels just the same, calming and atmospheric, with hints of a bubbling intensity lingering just below the surface. Again, we have that gradual escalation, slowly but surely building up to a crescendo which it seems to waver between reaching and then backing away from. Superb for reading to once again.
Track three is notably shorter in length than the preceding two tracks, but again along very similar grounds. Strings very gradually building in intensity towards a peak we purposefully never reach.
Track four is a delicate, tiptoeing strings piece, with gentle short strokes of the strings giving us a quiet but evocative backdrop.
The same can me said for Track Five, with almost a plucking of strings amongst waves of quiet and layered strings. Moody but full of quietly bottled tension.
Track six is equally as moody, yet a number of notes lower, laying a thick fog of an evocative backdrop. You begin to get ‘Twin Peaks’ (1990) vibes from this, until a rising throng of quivering strings comes in adding a peaking horror edge to the piece.
Track seven has a hint more drive to it, but not by much. It’s still creeping down the corridors, although with hints of woodwind we hear in the depths of the calming strings. Even whisperings of female vocals coming in, just vocal ranges with no actual words, layering onto the atmosphere of the music.
Track eight is an emotive offering, lighter in layers, with maybe one or two separate sections of strings coming together in a back-and-forth play with notes. Wonderfully enchanting and atmospheric once again.
Track nine lightly tiptoes down the still and silent corridors once again. Slow and cautious strings are gradually emerging from underneath this, rising to a short put plateaued crescendo.
Track ten is the second longest piece on the album, at a little over 4 minutes in length. It, however, stick firmly with the brief of the overarching music, with gradual, layered strings and a base layer of rising and falling low-noted strings. Again, as with the rest of the album, this is absolutely perfect reading music.
Track eleven has a bit more of a pacing to it, with wind instruments providing footsteps of a rhythm. The strings are of course still there, gradually building with intensity, then backing away the next minute.
Honestly the remaining nine tracks are really very much along the same sort of grounds. Rising and falling strings, hints of escalation, often plateauing before peaking, or simply backing away.
That said, track fifteen is where some of the first bursts of real drama kicks in. At only one-minute in length, it holds an intensity in its blood from the start, only fading away in the last ten seconds of the track.
Track nineteen again isn’t particularly long, but manages to start out relatively peaceful and tranquil, before around halfway through, we have a stirring pot of intensity as the drama kicks in with more urgent strings delivering an evocative, tense section which builds to the very last second of the track.
The last track, track twenty, is a darker, maybe more sci-fi piece, with a strange alien or even industrial sounding drone utilised in parts. Still those layered strings keep those waves of intensity flowing until the end of the track, and indeed the end of the album.
As a soundtrack for reading to:
The soundtrack as a whole:
© DLS Reviews
