Volume 11 – October 17, 2004

Making of Cyborg (Chant I) – Kenji Kawai [4:29]
Riddle of Steel (Riders of Doom) – Basil Poledouris [5:38]
Paranoid (UNKLE Variation) – UNKLE (with South) [5:15]
Flash (Theme) – Queen [3:30]
Woo Hoo – The 5.6.7.8’s [1:59]
Jaan Pehechaan Ho – Mohammed Rafi [5:29]
What Planet Is This?! – Yoko Kanno & The Seatbelts [4:32]
Run – Toshiyuki Honda [3:19]
Memo from Turner – Mick Jagger [4:08]
Canción Del Mariachi (Morena De Mi Corazón) – Los Lobos with Antonio Banderas
Porpoise Song (Theme from Head) – The Monkees [2:53]
Playground Love – Air [3:32]

Liner Notes:

I have always loved movie soundtracks. The OST for The Crow was a must-have album for pretty much everyone I knew in high school (it’s really one of the all-time great soundtrack albums), and for a kid from a small town, soundtracks were often the kind of weird compilation album that could introduce me to music that wouldn’t get played on the radio or stocked in our record stores otherwise. I’d wanted to do a movie-themed set list right from jump, and here was my chance. Most of these are pretty obvious; Kenji Kawai’s work on Ghost in the Shell will be immediately recognizable to anime and science fiction fans, Basil Poledouris’ score for Conan the Barbarian is one of the great accomplishments of film composing, Queen’s work on the cult classic Flash Gordon is iconic, while Yoko Kanno has done almost nothing else except anime scores for her entire career, and I dipped extensively into her Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell work throughout my run on In Praise of Borders. “Woo Hoo” comes from Kill Bill, “Playground Love” is part of Air’s excellent work for Sophia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, and “Jaan Pehechaan Ho,” while originally recorded by Mohammed Rafi for the 1965 film Gumnaam, came to me by way of Ghost World, the film now best remembered as Scarlett Johansson’s launch pad to fame. I’ve never actually seen Performance, the film “Memo from Turner” comes from, but the song has been a kind of poison ear worm for me nearly all my life. “Run” is from Toshiyuki Honda’s amazing score for Rintaro’s animated Metropolis film, and Los Lobos represents Desperado, a film that I watched over and over again in high school. I also haven’t seen Head, the film for which the Monkees recorded what is probably their best and most sophisticated song, but it did show up in Vanilla Sky, Cameron Crowe’s compelling remake of Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los ojos. The mix of “Paranoid” I included on this set list is part of the Sexy Beast soundtrack.

The photo for the cover of this volume is a closeup of melted snow beading on my wool coat, taken on a Grand River Transit bus with a camera that wasn’t fitted with macro lens.