Noma — Hung By Hair… The Music For

If there’s one distinct advantage that imaginary soundtracks have over the regular type, it’s that a godawful movie cannot stand in the way of enjoyment of the music written for it. What’s more, a good imaginary soundtrack sets loose your imagination and creates, before your mind’s eye, a galore of visual imagery that can be as awe-inspiring, as unsettling, or as heart-breaking as your own gray matter can manage. I guess that all music, in a sense, has that quality – that it may conjure up imagery, stories – but it is especially the brand of evocative instrumental music, adorned with enigmatic and/or generic titles, that drowns us in cinematic scenes that exist only in our mind.

Noma’s Hung By Hair… The Music For features both music for a short story written by John Cromar (Noma) himself some years back, and music for an imaginary movie – though I’m not sure if the two overlap here. In any case, the music here, effectively, is a score, created, in part, as functional music that is to support a narrative, be it textual or visual. What that narrative is remains unread and unseen; all we have here is the moody music and the illustrious track titles – to name some, Portrait of Death (no. 3) and Left With One Hand – which could be about anything, really. However, all things combined, there’s an undeniable veneer of mystery, suspense and terror here, and it quickly becomes clear what type of story Cromar has to tell.

The opener and title track consists of a succession of drones fading in and out for close to 20 minutes, with the pattern of swells changing often subtly, and sometimes more abruptly, in tone and composition; low-end hums, like the resonance of strings, dominate the first few minutes, but gradually higher frequency waves of sound work their way into the mix, with the metallic hum of echoing cymbals defining much of the atmosphere. While the layering of sounds is handled neatly, and the resulting waves of sound are increasingly captivating, the composition itself, with its succession of fades, does not seem as interesting. Eventually an unyielding synth-like drone creeps in, and it is only then that the track really seems to take off; undeniably there’s  a distinct cinematic quality to it, and especially the unsettling metallic tune that wraps the thing up seems oh-so suitable for a creepy movie of sorts.

Elsewhere, similar ingredients are used to cook up slightly different dishes; Borrowed Symbols 1 seems composed of (piano) strings and cymbals as much as the opening track, but is slightly more matter-of-factly, as it lacks the waving drones and chooses to pick up not the subharmonic, resonant frequencies, but, straightforwardly, the plucks and tinkering themselves. At other times, like on Left With One Hand (Remix), the music seems to’ve been lifted straight from some underscore sections of any given horror movie soundtrack. While such material does not really break new ground in any which way, it’s done with enough class and style to captivate – and raise some hairs. Mobility, by all means, seems to be the odd one out here; it’s a continuously growing barrage of beeps that sounds like the scores from ten NES RPG’s layered – though it’s in fact a “tune made from dozens of melodies you could make on very early mobile phones”, as per the label description. It’s nicely done, and sounds pretty decent, but at the same time seems completely out of place. Glass Tears, a sort of lullaby that is just short of haunting, wraps up the disc nicely though.

Overall, Hung By Hair… The Music For is slightly hit-and-miss; Croman proves to have a good ear for great sounds and textures, but these are not always processed or composed so effectively that they go beyond being, simply, great sounds and textures. As compositions, about half the tracks here actually undermine the sonic potential, which is a bit of a shame. Otherwise, Hung By Hair… The Music For is a perfectly decent and at times even highly evocative piece of work – and that, for an imaginary soundtrack, is probably the most important achievement.