Search - Robert Devereux :: Fungicide: Music Inspired by Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris Stories

Soundtrack to Ambergris?

Daniel H. Bigelow | Cathlamet, WA USA | 11/09/2006

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Robert Devereux is a one-man band, playing all the instruments on his album inspired by Jeff Vandermeer's lush, doom-filled, fungus-infested fantasy city of Ambergris (from Vandermeer's books City of Saints & Madmen and Shriek: An Afterword). Devereux also composed most of the music, though he gives an improbable folk origin for the music for Ambergris's Festival of the Freshwater Squid. He is eclectic as all get-out, processing flutes, piano, guitar, and even Tuvan throat-singing electronically to match sounds to moods.



Devereux's avowed intention to create a soundtrack to Ambergris, however, worked too well to interest me. I'm not a fan of most soundtrack music, with their melodies designed to create and enhance mood subtly while our attention is on the story. While it might be fine in the background, often it is incomplete without something in the foreground for it to reflect and enhance. Added to its apparently limited production budget, this made much of the album sound to me like those amateurish synthesizer soundtracks one sometimes hears on low-budget BBC miniseries or Sci-Fi channel one-offs.



Also, some of Devereux's musical experiments are ill-advised and unsuccessful, like his attempts in Uzumaki and The Man Who Had No Eyes to translate visual stimuli into music (in Uzumaki by taking sheet music and warping it, then playing the results; in No Eyes by translating the numbers corresponding to letters in the text of a Vandermeer short story directly into sound).



Still, there are points of interest here. The tracks titled Albumuth Boulevard and Dradin, In Love both achieve a rough approximation of the mood I got from Vandermeer's works, though, as I said, in a low-budget kind of way. The album's greatest success is The Transformation of Martin Lake, in which the weakness of the music as a foreground attraction is eliminated because Devereux introduces vocals: readings from Vandermeer's story of the same title. Vandermeer's evocative language is fascinating, and Devereux's music enhances the eerie mood.



The album also features Vandermeer's words in a reading of his short story The Exchange to close out the disk, and a sample chapter of Vandermeer's Shriek: An Afterword in the inventively designed CD case."