Ennio versus Ennui

When you reach a certain age, you find that the modern music is not really generating a reliable supply of raptures and ruptures -  they come, but so much more infrequently. 

But - strange thing, this - you can find a reliable supply of rapture/rupture through things that are from the past but are new to you. 

It's not like the faculty for bliss has atrophied, not at all... it's that you have a cut-off point, or rather a tapering off point. Your audio-erogenous centers are attuned to a certain era, and the music that led up to that era too, I guess, also works, up a point (or back to a point). 

At any rate, last year I was granted - blessed - ambushed by such a visitation of old-but-new-to-me sublimity. 

Actually, I surely must have heard this, but before my ears were so highly bliss-attuned. Because I watched A Fistful of Dynamite as a kid and remember being intrigued by the plot (a  Western, but the protagonist is an IRA man in exile in Mexico, where he uses his explosives skill for nefarious ends) and also taken by the dreamy (and not-so-dreamy) flashbacks to Ireland of his youth. James Coburn plays the IRA man - and he was then and remains one of my favorite movie faces / voices / presences, since seeing The President's Analyst. 

 

A bit of the soundtrack - that swingletastic Italo-MOR vocal refrain - I did instantly recognise, in fact - but that scarcely prepared me for the shimmering majesty of "Invenzione Per John". 

Go on, listen - listen to the whole thing. 

Now to my untrained ear that sounds like a harmonically complex piece of music. Like, what is that emotion?  The piece also features an insistent, almost jarring rhythm - a bolero? - that feels both at odds with and yet perfect for the billowing cloud of strings, voices, mandolins, and what almost sounds like controlled waves of guitar feedback.

If not for the rhythm, the opposite of groove, this does feel like something that belongs in the rock leftfield of the day.  It's almost like something the Velvet Underground might have gotten to, if John Cale had stayed and Lou left, and John had conceived a desire to beat Crosby Stills Nash and Young at their own game.  

Or maybe by Skin - that offshoot of Swans 

Or perhaps a backdrop against which Scott Walker could have intoned one of his abstract and dark-mystical songs,  "Boy Child", say, rather than "The Old Man's Back Again". 

But I wasn't thinking of comparisons and references when I heard it that first time while watching the film -  where it recurs several times and is more or less the unofficial theme - I was just levitating. Floored, but also skyed. 

Bizarrely, A Fistful of Dynamite is also known under the even more cheesy title Duck, You Sucker!. 

Here's another version of "Invenzione per John", not quite as amazing, but like seeing a beloved face from a different angle.