Metropolis

by Jason BirchmeierScoring a soundtrack to German director Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis seems like a suitable task for Jeff Mills. The film itself is a landmark, not just of the silent era but of all time, surely one of the most visionary films ever, and Mills is known for his similarly visionary work as one of the world's most conceptual techno artists. The resulting soundtrack is a monumental undertaking, further accentuated by Mills' roots in Detroit, a modern industrial wasteland not much unlike the fictional dystopia of Lang's film. The album goes scene by scene through the film, some tracks, like "Entrance to Metropolis," quietly foreboding while others, like "Flood," dizzily chaotic. As you may expect, Metropolis resembles Mills' conceptual work more than it does his dancefloor work. More than anything, his X-103 project, Atlantis, and his Axis recordings, particularly the From the 21st album, are good touchstones. And when held up against these, Metropolis shines. You can sense the shifting sequences of the film, and it's quite thrilling toward the conclusion when the music intensifies. Mills relies primarily on synthesizers, forgoing the hard, banging percussion you sometimes correlate with him. In fact, only about half the tracks employ a percussive foundation while every one is awash in cold, eerie, inhuman synthesizer ambience. Furthermore, no single track stands out. All are parts of the whole and quite similar to one another in tone, differing mostly in terms of mood. Ideally, Metropolis should accompany the film's images, but if you've seen the film, you can envision the corresponding scenes as you listen. And if you haven't seen the film, you should; it's magnificent. You don't necessarily need to, though, since Mills' work here is amazing on its own, but you'd be missing half the beauty of this soundtrack, which is as much adaptation and interpretation as it is invention.