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Ridiculously Long Songs I Like; Mona Lisa Overdrive
Named after the William Gibson novel and used in the soundtrack to The Matrix Reloaded (ah, we weren't to know the trilogy would cop out on us before the end!) for one of the most thrilling car chases ever put to digital film, this is a collaboration between the composer Don Davis and the tribal fusion band Juno Reactor. I doubt I would enjoy this track half as much or for half as long if it didn't evoke the visuals of the movie every time I hear it's entire 10:09.
Better yet, one of my favorite all time pieces of television, the Top Gear challenge to see whether a bobsled or a Mitsubishi Evo Rally car is faster over 2 km of ice, mashed this in with other tracks including Rob Dougan's Speed Me Towards Death (a weedy 4:30) to produce two minutes of footage that to this day, two and a half years later, still gives me goosebumps whenever I see it.
Juno Reactor's work is distinctive with the tribal drums and percussion blending in with cinematic musical score that Don Davis provides. The opening hails you with trumpets blaring and a thumping pulse of a beat cut with the rattle of drumsticks, there is no doubting that this is a slow burn start.
After two and a half minutes of undulating, throbbing foreshadowing there is a lull, a ping, and the beat takes off at a breakneck pace. Just as in the movie the scenes shift from city streets to the freeway this track is now up into top gear and barreling along. Beat and accompaniment are brutal and urgent, rising fast and repeatedly with each seemingly suicidal impending derailment being brought back down with a crash.
Six minutes in something new arrives, despite the panic attack of the beat, angelic voices and a Gregorian chanting choir rise to a crescendo, this could be climactic, this could be it, this could be the reason we're being bundled along without a chance to catch our breath and then, no, we're back into the beat and unrelenting drums. Its hardly surprising this fit so well into the ADD techno-manifesto of the new millenium, it just never gives up and is all about raising the tempo of your pulse.
Twenty seconds from the end we're still being battered by the beat and there really is nothing else for the track to do than just sto
May.24.2007