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.
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.
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The insert includes notes about the score and film from the director, composers, and editor.
