The village detective - a song cycle : original motion picture score

"This is another in the series of highly effective collaborations between film maker Bill Morrison and members of the Bang on a Can collective ... Among numerous other projects, their various textures of atmospheric post-minimal loops being an ideal complement to the flickering, faded, half-hidden, fluidly metamorphosed images of the films. The Village Detective is a prime example of a Morrison-Lang project. A print of the 1969 Soviet comedy crime drama whose McGuffin was a stolen accordion, was hauled up in a deep-sea fishing net from the depths of the Atlantic, where it had languished for fifty years. Morrison constructed a film from the damaged reels and extracts from other works by the film's star, whose career had spanned pre-revolutionary and Soviet Russia, which serves as a kind of abstract documentary of twentieth century Russia. The melancholy oscillating, looping intervals and chords of Lang's score, for solo accordion, perfectly represent ... a single set of lungs diving into the ocean to retrieve this story [of] ... the beautiful, tragic, and inexorable drift of time. Although described as "A Song Cycle", the voice only appears in the final track".

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