Mark Isham
Black Mirror – Arkangel Orginial Score
Out 12th October
Yellow coloured vinyl / standard black LP / CD
Charlie Brooker doesn’t sleep so well at night. His four Black Mirror series wallow in psychological dystopia, satirical irrationality and pure everyday angst; He can’t look at his mobile. His computer has the camera blocked out. He never watches TV. The future for Charlie never looked so certain in these uncertain times.
Black Mirror reflects his and our innermost fears of what’s to come. From its inception in 2012 its track record for plot lines coming true has become uncomfortably consistent – don’t mention the pig.
Arkangel (series four, episode two, directed by Jodie Foster) examined the concept of child tagging plus the teenage terrors brought about by exposure to pornography and graphic violence. It’s brooding, malevolent, claustrophobic, unnerving… all good stuff, from over protection to over stimulation.
So, who better to create the perfect musical backdrop to such troubled times than Mark Isham, a man whose dramatic tension diviner is buzzing. He is the man who made the daunting tube-city waves come alive in Point Break; he made the Hitcher seem even worse than he was; he scored the melodramatic trauma that made the finale of The Crash such a headspinner.
Mark Isham has pedigree and a sagging mantelpiece – he has Grammys and Emmys … he’s an electronic specialist honing the feeling of foreboding into an art form. The plotline of Arkangel was perfect for him, it was all his – prickly, moody, melancholy, too close for comfort, dark, dangerous, haunting. How could this tale of growing up wrong be any better orchestrated?
Part of the cult Black Mirror legacy which Charlie Brooker claimed offers “more hope”, not that we’d give a plot spoiler but perhaps that doesn’t ring true.
Meanwhile, Charlie Brooker’s phone rings to the stomach-churning middle passage of the soundtrack’s closing track ‘Consequences’ – it’s a nervy, nervy, nervy kind of sound after a whole album’s worth of precarious sorrowful soundtracking.
That Brooker, he’ll regret writing this one… has he got kids? Yeah? Thought so – Arkangel is coming.
Fire Records
