You meet the strangest people when you’re out at night when a casual stroll down a city street exposes you to all the bit players in the freak show called life. Anyway, as I pondered that philosophical entree, the need for a soundtrack came upon me. Lacking the finance to hire Angelo Badalamenti but feeling the need for something avant-garde led me to this album by Dal Knezevic.
I am – perhaps – doing “A Long Dark Night Of The Soul” an injustice by calling it a soundtrack but it
does nonetheless have the feel of soundtrack cues that have had all the gaps filled in with oddly compelling jazz and ambient interludes. Taken as a whole, however, this album can’t really be called background music either as it has a sort of hypnotic effect on you. The last song “Junius”, for example, is just the kind of thing that you would hear in your head (or you would if you had David Lynch directing the movie…) as you walked into the sunrise after a night of unexplained perversion.
There is also a curiously fragmented kind of completeness to this album. The way it has been assembled or created or however the artistic muse possessed Mr Knezevic shows a sense of purpose that gives a direction and focus to his musical aims and he manages to pull everything in the same direction. Take as an example the vaguely bluesy “Silhouettes” that grooves in a way that you might dream that Taj Mahal and Serbian ambient maestro PNDC would do if they got together.
Especially considering it is – barring a spot of the old narration – an instrumental album, listening to “A Long Dark Night Of The Soul” proved to be a complex and rewarding experience and that’s plenty good enough for me.
Available from CD Baby.