Andrée Greenwell: Cinéaste | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Where to begin with Cinéaste? Contemporary-classical composer Andrée Greenwell’s impressive portfolio of scores for film, TV and even live theatre come together in this expansive twenty-two-track digital album with a lot to say. With her track record of creating eerie, avant-garde and post-punk performances such as Sweet Death, a chamber opera about a girl who quite literally overdoses on pastries, or her 2016 album Gothic, you wouldn’t be entirely mistaken for expecting this to follow in those footprints.

The opening track, simply titled Trio, perfectly toes the line between beauty and the macabre. There’s a video accompanying this piece made up of shots of natural environments intercut with footage of moths trapped in a spider’s web. This mix is quite dry at first, which adds to this natural, earthy aesthetic Greenwell’s chosen for the video. Violin and cello play a duet with very little reverb obscuring either part as they weave with one another. As the music takes a turn, electronics cutting above the strings before pervading the sound altogether, a spider seizes two of the moths, enveloping and paralysing them in seconds. It ends with long, drawn-out echoing of electronica.

The album does, however, have its moments of light in the darkness with tracks such as Spanish Cowboy. It’s a strange little piece- just over a minute in length, like most of the works on the album. With its Phillip Glass sequencing and Stelvio Cipriani melody, the piece has a sultry, lilting melody with an improvisational feel.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Cinéaste has tracks such as Fire and Maria Walks, both instrumental reductions of previously performed vocal works from Listen to me and Gothic respectively. The effect of both these is infinitely more palpable in the original recording before the vocal line was removed in this album. Fire, with its spoken word voice over by Candy Royalle recalling the trauma of gendered violence, loses some meaning without these vocals. However, with the screeching tenor saxophone becoming more and more raw as the piece progresses, Cinéaste’s version of the track still maintains that same on-edge, looking-over-your-shoulder tension.

This album is a journey through genre, with an expert approach to post-minimalism and the merging of electronica and acoustic instrumentation. These pieces don’t feel like studies, however, or works made simply to experiment with various soundscapes: each work evokes a scene, or a memory, or even just a feeling. The world of soundtracks is wallpapered with bland backgrounds; at the very least Cinéaste proves there's something more viscerally alive in Andrée Greenwell.

- Alison Paris.
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