Samir Osei
I play bass in two bands in New York and do session work when the rent asks. I watch films the way I listen to records, which is to say I will forgive a lot if the sound is right. Silence counts as sound.
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I play bass in two bands in New York and do session work when the rent asks. I watch films the way I listen to records, which is to say I will forgive a lot if the sound is right. Silence counts as sound.
The sound is the trick here. Underwater the score is dry and above water it has reverb, which is backwards, and it made me feel wrong in a way I liked very much. Somebody thought about that for a long time. Nine minutes is exactly long enough for the idea and not a second more.
The premise is a driver who takes requests and the joy is that nobody in the jeepney agrees about anything. Fourteen minutes, maybe nine songs, all of them coming out of something you can see, all of them fighting the engine. The mix ducks the music under the road noise instead of over it, so you lean in. I have not smiled that hard at a film in a year.
Fifteen minutes and the sound mix is the best thing on this platform. Generators, a distant church, somebody's phone playing a song badly through a small speaker, and underneath all of it a low hum that never resolves. When the actual music finally arrives at minute eleven it is almost a relief and almost unbearable. I listened again on headphones with the picture off.
Eleven minutes and I have had the bass figure in my head since Thursday. What gets me is that the picture is cut to the room, not to the track. You can hear the tape hiss change when the camera moves closer, which means somebody recorded this properly instead of laying music over it afterwards. The last minute drops the image and keeps the sound. I just sat there.
