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There’s definitely music in the air on L&UL lately. Especially movie music. Kottke recently pointed me to this excellent post on The Morning News by RadioLab’s Jad Abumrad. Abumrad rounds up some of his favorite movie music moments, and I must say my jaw dropped when I saw his list beacuse it was so close to my own. Alexandre Desplat’s lush orchestral score for Jonathan Glaser’s extraordinary film Birth takes the Disney fairytale sound and throws it ever so slightly off-kilter, perfectly matched to the eerie magic of Glaser’s lush fantasyland on the Upper East Side. Huge Soderbergh fan that I am, I agree with Abumrad that the only really redeeming thing about his remake of Solaris was Cliff Martinez’s incredible, minimalist score. With overtones of Steve Reich and Terry Riley, Martinez’s looped percussive phrasing is hypnotic—listen to this music while you’re in motion and your journey will be transformed. Also on Abumrad’s list are Bernard Hermann’s great scores for Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Psycho, the jarring high notes of which both Abumrad and I see shades of in Jonny Greenwood’s superb soundtrack for There Will Be Blood.