: (Geasje Palacek) Have
you ever had a really hot date? There was an Englishman who did in the
1970's... He had taken his lady to a London disco where she suddenly
exploded while on the dance floor. The flames emanating from her body
were so intense that they shrunk her head to the size of a fist by the
time she could be extinguished. Amazingly, nobody around her was
injured. Still, a major bummer for the guy's psyche. You often find
strange things when researching the phenomenon of spontaneous human
combustion, a joyous event usually involving elderly people who blow up
in their seats, their torsos reduced to ashes while their newspaper and
cushions are barely touched. A personal favorite "SHC" event happened to
some poor chap sitting on the toilet in the 1950's; when he exploded,
his leg shot like a rocket through the floor and knocked a radiator
clean off the wall in the apartment below. More intriguing is the fact
that there are gruesome pictures of these events that are rarely seen by
the public. Treatment of spontaneous human combustion in media has
usually been restricted to cult shows like
, though a
1995 film out of Eastern Europe addressed the topic in a more
interesting way: animated horror. Very little is known about the low
budget production of
outside of
information that can be discovered on the packaging of a bootleg release
of its orchestral underscore. What few accounts exist for the picture
indicate that it is a straight adult horror film that just happened to
be based in the animated genre, making anyone with common sense wonder
how many Romanian kids who went to see this film were utterly terrorized
by its contents. Comparisons to more recent animated filth place
A seemingly disturbed (or just mentally juvenile) young
woman discovers a sorcerer/wizard who inexplicably gives her the power
to cause other people and animals to spontaneously combust (still...
better her than George W. Bush), and someplace between
Carrie and
The Fury, something obviously goes wrong with her decision-making
process. Other details are sketchy. Very little is also known of
European composer Geasje Palacek, who was rumored to be a composition
student at the time of the film's release. While she certainly had
enough skill to assemble a full orchestral ensemble and choir, her use
of that group in this film leaves no doubt as to why her career failed
before really getting started. There's no indication that she personally
had the ability to make anything other than eardrums spontaneously
combust. If there's any doubt regarding the seriousness of
Spontaneous Human Combustion, Palacek clearly extinguishes that
doubt in each and every cue. So disturbing is the ensemble's performance
in this score that the music on album is completely intolerable. Its
dissonance and atonality are so extreme that even die hard Alex North
fans might combust when hearing it... Nothing like it really exists in
the film music world. Looking back at the most dissonant music by North,
Leonard Rosenman, and others, there has never been a score as
maliciously rendered as
Spontaneous Human Combustion. No thematic
elements exist, nor are there any clear motifs. Pacing is erratic and
crescendos often begin and end without natural boundaries. What play
like wild cuts and backwards edits are seemingly written directly into
the orchestra's performances. A "wall of noise" approach is offered in
nearly all cues, with the volume of the conversational pieces simply
reduced to lower levels. There isn't even enough distinguishing clarity
to each instrumental variant to allow the score to rise above the
description of random sound effects. During a scene of livestock
combustion, Palacek forces what sounds like a bassoon and trombone
together to produce the horrific death cry of a cow (over a bed of tacky
80's laser synth sounds, no less).
Structurally, Palacek's music differs from conventional
atonal scores by not only instructing the distinct orchestral sections
to perform in different keys and tempos, but even individual players in
each section. There can be several French horns all performing a note
apart at exactly the same moment, for instance. If you stop to think
about this, it must have been a monumental task to write the actual
sheet music for the players, unless, of course, she told the players to
simply perform haphazardly in any direction they wanted. The resulting
total mess is equivalent to telling a symphony to let their warm-up
tuning session go wild and have everyone let rip with whatever they
wanted at any given moment. The performances in
Spontaneous Human
Combustion are a little more scripted than that, with individual
lines that expert ears could have fun pulling out of the noise. There
are, for example, East Indian percussion and vocal performances that
will remind of Ravi Shankar and Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Evidence of
electronic manipulation suggests that some of these distinct lines may
have been recorded separately and mixed into the ensemble either
reverted (backwards) or otherwise mutilated. The actual explosion
sequences (which seem to be numerous in the score... there must be a
whole lot of combustion happening on screen) are treated with wild
crescendos of climbing brass notes, never in any particular key, and an
extremely annoying pair of flutes blasting away at their highest and
loudest possible regions. Sadly, the score ends with one such
ear-destroying sequence, spelling an ominous doom for the primary
character of the film. The score was never released commercially on
album, though it received a Romanian bootleg in the year of its release.
At a length of over 70 minutes, you will be praying for your own combustion
after a full listen, making
Spontaneous Human Combustion a prime
candidate for use as a torture tool. For the enjoyably sickening
pictures of exploding animated livestock on the packaging, the score and
album avoid the dreaded FRISBEE rating.
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