The first piece, “Black Swan Part 1” starts off with classical music, before a scuffing texture rises up and threatens to overwhelm it - but it never does. A visit to the Muzikaal Kabaal website reveals that the tape begins with the audio from the first ten minutes of the film (dialogue, soundtrack and sounds); ending with the last ten minutes on the second side. Thus, we have actors’ lines just out of earshot, buried beneath scuffing, scratchy mid-paced textures; after ten minutes of which, the wall textures take over. Its an interesting idea: much more effective (in my opinion) than just starting a track with a short, token snippet of audio, relating to the theme of the release. Saying this, it only really works because of the duration of the track; because truth be told, there’s an uneasy, frustrating balance between the wall elements and the “sampled” elements - with the latter smothered by the former, and the former intruded on by the latter. However, it does raise the idea of the wall textures recreating or annotating the narrative of the film itself, between the sampled book-ends - a very interesting idea indeed. Unfortunately, it was a long time back that I watched Black Swan; and I can only conjure up the nutshell of the core narrative; so its for someone else to decide how accurately the release does this… (If, indeed, it does this at all.) Sonically, though, the tape is dominated by mid- and lower mid-frequencies; quite violent and tearing, but without achieving an overwhelming assault. These crumbling, stuttering textures become very agitated at times and never truly settle: its a long, dirty trawl of decrepit crackle and texture. When the final ten minutes of Black Swan audio emerges, at the end of the tape, it really does grab the ear and lead it to the end. Though the essential result of this, is merely that I really want to see the film again.

Black Swan is a great film for exploration, in HNW terms. When I saw it, I felt there were prevailing themes of clarity, delicacy and hardness - all great starting points for textural work. Movies’ tracks don’t really approach those concepts, but then they may have seen the film quite differently to me. This isn’t an essential release, but Movies is definitely a project to keep an eye on.