Brocker Way

Brocker Way’s ‘Wild Wild Country’ is the score to the Emmy winning Netflix docuseries created by his brothers.

Telling the tale of Rajneeshpuram, a commune/town established near Antelope, Oregon, USA in 1981 by Indian mystic Baghwan Shree Rajneesh, it’s the intriguing story of how a utopian ideal (‘a need to create a new humanity’) turned sour going from initial local hostility and resulting in state surveillance and bio-terrorism.

A conundrum that arises when consuming music that has been created and designed for and then attached to moving images is that as a listener who has yet to see the images and narrative assemblage how does the music function or work? What reactions and thoughts can, does and will it provoke aside from its composer’s intended emotion-prodding optic-aural interface nexus? What messages are encoded by the composer to be decoded by the listener and are there manipulations at play? Does the overall soundtrack tell a story of its own? Finally and maybe crucially does the soundtrack make me want to see the programme?

So many questions with the only answer lying within the actual listening. Therefore …

The titles tells stories of their own (‘Church and State’ ‘Spies in overalls’) with the tracks varying from incidental, mood-inducing backdrops (The Takeover’, ‘Fashionable Leather Shoes’) to wig-outs like the Geoff Barrow’s Beak> evoking ‘The New Man’, a haunting visitation in every way and ‘Be grateful for this beautiful house’ and ‘Chosen People’ both heart-rate racing electro-pulse throbs. ‘High Desert’ is a spaghetti-Western panorama, as horns and strings tussle in the dust.

Opener ‘The Guillotine’ and ‘Life for myself’ are both cello-ish chop-changers, metaphorical knife-edges yet both emancipatory in tone and feel.

The ultimate answer to the raised questions is that this is a ‘soundtrack film’: the music ‘speaks’ and ‘creates’ in the act of listening which has seduced this listener to want to see the series *rests head and binge watches*