Buy it... if you are a collector of alternative rock and dreary new age music and you've previously enjoyed Asche and Spencer endeavors.

Avoid it... if you believe in the fundamental structure of film scoring and that a composer should write the music for a film at the end of its production rather than the beginning.

Stay: (Asche and Spencer) To understand anything about this film and its score, you really have to study the underlying style of editing that the film uses to transition from scene to scene. On the surface, Stay is about a psychologist whose suicidal client makes bizarre predictions that start coming true and pose ominous possibilities for everyone involved. It's a reality-bending psychological thriller, and Marc Forster departs from his techniques in Finding Neverland to use a scene-changing style in Stay that not only is interesting to watch, but also makes statements about the film on secondary levels of plot analysis. The strategy of carrying one element of a current scene into the next, transitioning with common shapes and colors in each edit, is something that one might think would provide intriguing opportunities for the music in that film. Either the composer could use an instrumental technique to represent each creative change in scene, or the changes in setting or camera view could be completely ignored. In this case, the latter strategy is used, with the score by Asche and Spencer retaining absolutely no characteristics of a typical film score. The group Asche and Spencer isn't actually two guys with those names --no Asche is involved-- but rather a dozen writers and performers led by Thad Spencer, who also led the team of experimental artists on the popular Marc Forster project Monster's Ball several years ago. Perhaps more than in any other type of film score, your like or dislike for Stay will depend on your opinion of the methodology used to create the music, for it is so different from usual film scoring that the avid film score collector will likely reject something like Stay without much more qualification. It's hard not to agree with people who regard this music as existing outside of the genre, for it is constructed much more like a solo album than a companion piece for a film.

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The process of creating a score like Stay goes like this: The director gives the recording group a copy of the script and rough edits of scenes of the film that have been shot in early production. The composers are then unleashed on their own to record hours of music with a small ensemble. The mass of music is then returned to the editor of the film at the end of production and that editor chooses what music from the large selection of cues works best in which scenes. Thus, the music was never written with a specific camera angle, flash of the eyes, or scene change in mind. To make the music work in this fashion, it has to be written in an anonymous enough format to be cut and paste throughout the film... no sudden jarring sequences will match up perfectly with the film, so they aren't attempted. In the case of Stay, the dozen or so performers have created a series of new age and light rock sounds that exist as nothing more than sound design. No distinguishable themes or motifs of importance are clearly evident; the score wanders aimlessly in a hopeless daze, which might be the appropriate emotion for the story of Stay. But this is not film music, and its wandering without any set direction doesn't offer any elaboration on character or scene. Everything drifts along in a fog, much like the comments of the film's editor about the score. In a nine-line paragraph, Matt Chesse uses repetitive metaphors to basically state "this music is important to this film" and uses the keyword "organic" as though he was describing a vegetable grown in Marin County, California. To him and to Spencer, the notion of "organic music" entails the use of piano, band elements, strings, and a whole lot of keyboarding and electronic programming. The programming seems to get the best of all the other elements in the end, however, washing out the only hopeful string cue on album ("Is That Your Voice?") and few cues with somewhat hip light rock rhythms ("You're Real," "A Walk in the Rain," and "I'm Never Gonna Sleep Tonight"). Overall, Stay is a non-listening experience for traditional film score collectors, and will be an album far more attractive to alternative rock and new age fans. There are fundamental flaws with this method of composition for film that this album clearly exposes. *   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download