DESTROYING THE DISTANCE
David Byrne Scores Young Adam

Well, no composer wants to be totally invisible—but realistically I knew that too much music that was obviously music might be too intrusive. It’s not a film that wanted to be filled with beats and tunes. The emotions are too subtle for that, in many cases.

-David Byrne

It has been said of David Byrne that he finds the sublime in the mundane. Mainly in reference to his photographs; all is animate within the frame. A series of cibachrome photographs entitled, Sleepless Nights, is of nineteen sole images comprised of tile angling part of a room, towel racks, fluorescent lights, and dim lamps. Objects that perhaps eluded him at first glance became significant when the lack of sleep sent him wandering through the hallways with a camera. They’re simply shot frames in which the electric drone of the motel late-night is almost palpable.

The opening sequence of Young Adam is entirely blue; the river Clyde rippling almost in time to Byrne’s scoring. A young woman’s corpse is floating, her arms buoy outstretched in an open parenthesis above water. Set mostly on a coal barge through the arterial canals between Glasgow and Edinburgh; water is the constant movement. Its currents seemingly carry the film’s unmoved characters caught in their life’s habit. The film is shot simply emphasizing the subtle movements within the frame. At times there’s nothing said and only the interior noise of the barge is heard. Plates, ropes, motors, footsteps become characters themselves, further augmenting their inert human counterparts.

In scoring the film, Byrne states that the “music” is more of an extension of those sounds, “a musical interpretation” that’s barely discernible. Languorous and undercurrent, it isn’t just seamless metronome or accompaniment. The instruments punctuate at their most audible. The second track from the score’s album, Lead Us Not Into Temptation is largely made of sounds Byrne himself recorded previously: a rusty gate, a guitar string “vibrating uncontrollably,” a subway train’s brakes. Of the Glaswegian musicians he played with was a hurdy gurdy player with one functioning drone string. Byrne commented the one note, “when tuned,” ideal. Scenes of the film on paper were given to the musicians and were told “...here are the notes you can play on this scene. You can play them whenever you want, and in whenever order you want.” This technique he called “a kind of John Cagian indeterminacy”; sounds that may have eluded you as music became recognized as such through awareness and extension.

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From my perspective, the film hardly glamorizes the Glasgow bohemia of the late 50s. It’s a vision familiar to readers of Bukowski—there is a drop of the sublime in the bottom of the glass, but you have to drink some foul stuff before you get to it.

-David Byrne

Published in the late 1950s, Young Adam is Alexander Trocchi’s best-known novel. The Scottish beat writer’s own life has been noted worthy of cinematic interpretation due to his more than lascivious ways involving heroin and prostitution. The book, however, is likened to Albert Camus’ The Outsider. The main character, Joe (played deftly by Ewan McGregor) is our falling from grace anti-hero. In the film, Joe lives discordantly, seemingly unaffected by his surroundings but the undercurrent is frailty in his inaction. Written from Joe’s perspective, a passage from the book explains:

I wanted to touch what I saw. But I could only touch a soft thing, a moist thing, a vibrant clinging thing. Sight and touch may be correlative but their objects are vitally different. Ceasing to see the rise of her breast as I pressed my lips to it to confirm it within myself, the thing which I wished to confirm fled away from me, and in its place was something soft and warm. There was no intimate and necessary relation between what I saw and what I touched. The impressions existed together like a stone and a melody, ludicrous, fraudulent, absurd. It is the feeling that something has eluded you.

-Alexander Trocchi

Throughout the film Joe fumbles through women—the sex almost feral with each one. It was suggested of Byrne to “make the couplings appear a little more sensuous” which was, “a bit of a challenge—because although it’s sexy it’s also pretty grimy and animal…which can be also sexy no doubt. So, I pointed out that aspect of what was going on, in a subtle way.” The result is a compliant desperation of two people. The often missing and at times supine intimacy hinted by the music.

Seemingly, all objects in the film are treated with the same animation—both human and non—by its director David MacKenzie. Everything moves with a cancerous languor as if anthracitic dust had nestled in their interiors. There are several scenes of Joe on the barge where there’s little movement save for him steering and the barge itself passing under stone bridges or along cobbled paths. The instruments escalate and then fade into the mechanical chug of the barge cleaving the channel.

The music serves as current in the film; respectfully swelling and dwindling in accordance with what the frame sustains. At these moments where the frame almost becomes an isolated photograph (however beautiful), Byrne settles the music in. He accomplishes what Joe desperately wanted in the book: to “destroy the distance” of what you’re merely seeing or, in the case of the film, only hearing as well. All becomes animate within the film’s frame: the stone and the melody are donned with the same grace. What has eluded you is now perceptible in various currents. The music becomes another character like the imminent blues and reds in the gorgeous cinematography of Giles Nuttgens. Then, Lead Us Not Into Temptation is music that, uncharacteristic of most film scores, doesn’t rely on the visuals it was meant to accent. It possess its own graceful carriage like the Clyde the woman’s body floats in—at times subtle and looming, but, constantly immersing.

Lead Us Not Into Temptation, Music for the Film Young Adam is out on Thrill Jockey. The film has been released in Europe and is being released in the United States by Sony Pictures.