![]() But the music quickly sours, clouded with uncertainty, as dark, shapeless figures clamber up from the lower register to disturb the tranquil upper reaches. These opening passages move with pastoral ease. An acoustic bass plucks out a tentative melody. It begins gently enough, with a high, lonesome harmony reminiscent of a freight train’s distant whistle. (Another comparison point might be the Boxhead Ensemble’s 1997 soundtrack to the film Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks Its Back, featuring O’Rourke alongside Chicago luminaries like Ken Vandermark and Douglas McCombs.) Closer in spirit to the longform drone works of his Steamroom series than the fingerpicked Americana of Bad Timing or the mischievous classic rock of Simple Songs, O’Rourke’s instrumental score is, much like the landscape of the film, flat, faintly menacing, and miserly with its details. A high-end fizz resembles the incessant whine of crickets the occasional spritz of static mimics the strange electrical phenomena on screen. His palette-detuned piano, watery vibraphone, and a muted, amorphous shimmer that might be harmonium or synthesizer-matches the film’s dusty tones of beige and pewter and mobile-home brown. ![]() Jim O’Rourke’s soundtrack is perfectly calibrated to this unforgiving space squashed between parched fields and blown-out sky. Even if you lie to yourself, as best as you can, and look for something you call true, well, whatever your theory is, it’s probably wrong.” Whatever’s easiest to swallow is what most folks gravitate towards. “Certainty is the rare exception to the rules of life. ![]() “My opinion isn’t going to solve anything for you, because my opinion is that I don’t know,” remarks a bartender played by a scene-stealing Will Oldham, as he turns off a Scratch Acid song on the stereo. The crucial question, which drives the film’s grippingly human drama as well as its more cryptic events, is philosophical in nature: whether we can ever truly be certain about anything.
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