The Broadcast soundtrack Berberian Sound Studio is a wonderful record, the kind of thing that unfolds its mystery gradually as you pass through it. It’s a collection of vignettes, images bound together thematically and sonically but which resist any easy resolution. The songs blur together into a larger aural canvass and although they don’t tell a story per se they do take you on a journey.
In the movie, an audio engineer in the studio for a B-level film company slowly loses his mind. This is, strangely, exactly the sort of analogy I would normally invoke to describe a record, eg., “This sounds like someone locked Phil Spector’s decaying corpse in a studio and gave him nothing but psilocybin mushrooms to eat for 36 hours.” This level of self-reference is spooky to say the least, but if ignore it you can sink quite deeply into BSS: organ drones, strange wind instruments, rattling reverb-heavy percussion, and the occasional horror-movie scream. The word “nightmarish” springs to mind, but probably that’s too harsh: the dream of Berberian Sound System is more deep and weird than it is scary, the kind of nighttime spirit quest that pulls you in deeper with every step.
But it’s also an auteur record in best sense. It’s an homage to movies and scores of the 1970s, but it doesn’t get so bogged-down in its process as to make it seem dusty or old. Berberian Sound Studio is incredibly patient, and it comes at you from the sides, creeping up out of the corner of your eye. And maybe it’s just me, but given the state of the world, I’m happy to start 2013 with a good scare.
Bars: 4/5
