Flood

Flood

On Flood, we join British composer Jocelyn Pook as witnesses to a catastrophe, transfixed by its totality, muted by its incalculable human toll. Pook's faintly beautiful, profoundly sad music is all that hovers above her ashen, apocalyptic landscapes, one we dare not survey too long, it seems, lest we suffer the fate of Lot's wife. Pook's ability to summon such imagery--via patient, edgy, atmospheric use of voice, strings (viola, violins, cello), and electronics--is what led film director Stanley Kubrick to invite Pook's participation on the original soundtrack for Eyes Wide Shut. First released in 1997, Flood contains two selections that were modified for the film: "Migrations," a hypnotic work with Middle Eastern textures and Persian vocalists, heard during the film's orgy scenes, and "Masked Ball," where Pook achieves an ominous effect by playing the chants of Romanian priests in reverse. The album's most arresting work may be "Oppenheimer," an evolving, multicultural choral requiem prefaced by a reflection on Hindu scripture spoken Robert Oppenheimer, an inventor of the atomic bomb. It is affectingly reprised in the album's haunting final track. A bleak and somber work, and an utterly absorbing one. --Terry Wood

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