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North's music of this time, elaborated upon for a modern audience by Jerry Goldsmith for Planet of the Apes, is dissonant, treble-dominated and tinny (even without issues of recording quality), atonal, and percussively abrasive. While North remains a composer of interest for some collectors of modern film scores (like Bernard Herrmann, but not to the same extent), his score for "Africa" will likely alienate anyone who is accustomed to the composer's specific style of producing multiple tonal lines of action to produce an overall atonal work that, on the surface, seems to generate into random dissonance. For casual collectors of the Silver Age of film music, you could assemble a full CD of North's most readily listenable music, and not a moment of it would come from "Africa." The percussion section is at the forefront of "Africa," and entire sequences of the score suite and symphony are dominated by the themeless and questionably organized combination of both Western and non-Western percussion, some of which created on the spot. This material culminates into the slightly more upbeat rhythms of "The Joyful Days." Both the string and woodwind sections offer seemingly unorganized collections of progressions that don't develop motifs with any consistency, thrown into the equation almost like another member of the percussion section. References to the title theme of the show are infrequent and often masked. The brass is extraordinarily harsh in its renderings, occasionally used in strikes (or "stingers," as they are technically termed) along with the percussion section to allow for use by editors in accentuating individual moments of transition or surprise. The rhythms used by North are inconsistent for much of the symphony recordings, never sustaining any sense of movement (or, in this case, evolution or progress) for any significant amount of time. The overarching unpredictability is the score's only cohesive element outside of the general instrumentation.

While certainly not being so, North's music for "Africa" sounds, in each of its cues, disorganized. Even the two variations of the title theme feature a jagged edge so brutal that they make Goldsmith's Capricorn One sound like pure romance. Because of a filing mistake, one of the recordings of the theme for "Africa" ended up with the rejected score for 2001: A Space Odyssey and was eventually re-recorded by Goldsmith for an album release. Despite the confusion caused by this mistake, the cue is undoubtedly a part of "Africa" and it is, interestingly, the only truly interesting piece from this television work. On the LP record that was released in 1968, the title theme was often favored, along with the four lengthy "Symphony" recordings that used a larger ensemble (of 100 members), than the music directly composed for specific scenes of the show. The LP, of course, fell out of print and the music was largely forgotten. And with North's style of the era falling out of favor, it's not hard to figure why. A limited Prometheus CD released in 2001 contains slightly more music (roughly five minutes) than the LP, including a slightly longer variation of the main theme. Sound quality is lacking in depth, but is surprisingly intimate in its mix. While the percussion section won't blow you off your feet, you can at least hear each creative element clearly regardless of what the rest of the ensemble is doing. The packaging is less detailed for this 2,000-copy release (which did not quickly sell out, unlike others in the series), with the track-by-track commentary seemingly missing in parts. Overall, it's easy to say that this album is aimed at dedicated Alex North fans. If you've been born and raised in the era of digital recordings of tonal film music, then "Africa" will sound more foreign to your ears than anything you've ever heard. Many collectors regard "Africa" as a classic, but even compared to its peers of the era, it has little cohesive structure and relies too heavily on textural nuance to translate into a satisfying album.  **   @Amazon.com: CD or Download

Total Time: 50:04