Cory Strand — The Shining: A Reinterpretation

Minneapolis based Cory Strand is one of the more interesting, creative & sonically varied artists to appear in the HNW/Drone scene in the last year or so.  He’s connected to various projects such as Lethe where he releases a mixture of hopeless drone,  HNW,  &  death ambience, he also runs the excellent Altar Of Waste Record label too. Under his own name he release reinterpretations/ often radical manipulations of some of his favourite movie soundtracks, and this CDR he takes on the classic & iconic Wendy Carlos soundtrack for Stanley  Kubrick’s take on Stephen King’s The Shining.

The CDR comes in the house style Altar of Waste colour sleeve DVD case, with the CDR featuring the picture from the end of the movie of the Jack Nicolson character at the Overlook Hotel Ball on July 4th 1921. The outside cover features a reproduction of the black & yellow The Shinning logo from the original Theatrical poster release, and on the reverse side we have a landscape photograph of the  vast mountains scape of Glacier National Park in Montana, which feature in the films opening credits.

The CDR takes in  just two tracks “Main Title-Part One” & “Main Title- Part two”. The first track takes up the lion share of the release at just over the forty five minute mark. This first track sees Strand manipulating Carlos original opening titles theme into a more stretched out and brooding synth/ electronic dwell ‘n’ drift.  The track opens with the first few minutes of her untouched soundtrack, but pretty soon Strand slows the pace & the structure right down to a wonderful malevolent crawl-this highlights the brooding chilling drift of the synth textures, the slow icy slow-mo coldness of the electronics, and the discordant dread of the other sound elements. As the tracks continues Strand takes the pace down & down to create this wonderful morbid sonic soup of suffocating dread

The second track comes in at just under the nine minute mark, and it finds Stand  kicking in with a muffled & noised up doom metal take on the theme, before ending off the track with a churning bass ribbed slice of walled noise texturing. The track is cleverly fed directly in from the end of the first tracks crawling ‘n’ brooding tone swirl, so you get a nice sudden jolt when the guitar/ noise elements kick-in. The first part of the track sees Strand building this cymbal crashing ‘n’ muffled airless doom riff take on the opening titles melody. At around 3.15 mark Strand moves the track into taut & constricted walled noise, which is built around a mixture tightly juddered & muffled noise bass which is surrounded by buzzing & juddering static sub-tones.

All told this is a very skilful reinterpretation of Carlos orignal soundtrack, and the films dread filled atmosphere. Strand has managed to link back to original soundtracks vibe & tone perfectly, yet he has managed to expanded it onto new grimmer & noisy territories too.