POWERLINES – REVIEW
Here is the transcription of the page from the AllMusic review of Powerlines:
Powerlines, film score
Composer
Helen Hall
Genre
Classical
Work Type
Film Music
Composition Date
1997
AMG Work ID
C 409875
Composition Description by “Blue Gene” Tyranny
The central theme of Helen Hall’s 1997 award-winning film, for which she created both an exquisite acoustic-electronic soundtrack (as composer) and visuals (as filmmaker), is electronic pollution. “A vast network of power lines now covers the entire earth, threaded across continents and under oceans, and it is forever changing the way we live. Telephone and television satellite transmitters cover the earth from space … While the entire world becomes electrified we are being overloaded by a vast world of electronic images, lights and sounds, as huge amounts of information travel around the world at the speed of light and interact with the millions of electrical processes in every living cell of our bodies … If our bodies send and receive information electrically, then what kind of information are they receiving from the electronic smog we live in?” (from the script of Powerlines).
In the case of music videos and animated films, the soundtrack (including dialogue) is always recorded first. For other films, the visuals with dialogue are created first and then the music is created to emphasize the action or provide an atmosphere. Helen Hall’s method in creating this work lies somewhere between these procedures: the music was finished before the visuals were shot; she had drawn up a graph score with the basic music elements, sound, lighting, dance, and text written on different vertical levels, with time on the horizontal axis, like an orchestral score with different families of instruments drawn on the vertical. After the visuals were shot, Hall edited in silence, the soundtrack only in her memory. Near the end of editing she completed the spoken text part which gave whatever information and imagery that was not already available. Other elements of the score were shifted about or amended to balance the elements.
There are seven scenes in this thirty-four minutes eighteen second film.
Scene 1
The film opens in darkness. Gradually building are images of St. Catherine Street in Montréal on a Saturday night — light free jazz, traffic and sirens, the sizzle of neon signs, a string ensemble playing different nervous rhythms crescendos to the fore.
Scene 2
High-tension power line towers in James Bay in a frozen November field. The 60Hz hum of the powerlines is doubled by strings playing that fundamental and its harmonics. A mournful but melodic solo cello accompanies a rhythmic dance “portraying the effects of radiation on the body.” Sizzles of the electrical sparks are mixed in.
Scene 3
The powerlines reach Montréal. Sounds of the river, electrical hum and narration.
Scene 4
A transformer station and its drone. Intermittent rhythms. Elaborate cello figures over two constantly, obsessively reiterated half-step intervals, occasionally broken by heavenly textures.
Scene 5
Sudden burst of city noise. Visuals and squiggly electronic noise of all sorts of night lights, fluorescent office lights, etc. Obsessive chords orchestrated in a new way. Visuals and noise of office technology — computers, FAX, etc. Dense visual and audio mix of satellite dishes, microwave towers, computer keypads, dial tones, shortwave radios, radio-TV static, beeps, alarms. A dancer in a computer room. Neon displays of the city.
Scene 6
A television store, split screen of sixteen European TV channels, information overload with more of scene 5-type imagery.
Scene 7
The cells of our bodies. DNA, the biosphere in Montréal, somatids (living condensers of energy), Lissajous patterns (in this case, computer-generated visual patterns of harmonic ratios) related to living cells. The film concludes with “… a transition into pure energy and light.”
Review by Blue Gene Tyranny
Composer, pianist, writer, and longtime contributor to AllMusic
helen hall 