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When news of this discovery reached one Jonny Trunk – renowned curator of music’s esoteric yesteryear (The Wicker Man soundtrack and music from The Clangers TV series being typical exhumations released by his Trunk Records label) – he was staggered as, to his certain knowledge the album had never been officially released. In fact, composer Edward Williams had pressed up a handful of copies as mementos for the musicians who played on the original recordings. Now, a mere 30 years after the composer’s haunting chamber suites first wafted into British living rooms, Trunk is making them available to everyone.
Surrey-born Williams was already a seasoned soundtrack creator by the time he recorded his Life on Earth accompaniments. Deploying a discreet orchestral arsenal – clarinet, flute, harp and strings alongside vibraphone, marimbas, keyboards, percussion and slivers of electronics – his pieces were adroitly designed to both mimic and augment the often stunning visuals, underlining the fluttering, flickering and often magisterial strangeness of the natural world as laid bare by Attenborough.
Thus, the aforementioned Sex Life of the Fern proves to be a compellingly autumnal harpsichord-led reverie, while sinuous woodwind arabesques ingeniously summon those jiggy Prairie Garter Snakes. Elsewhere, First Fossils paints the primordial world using little more than austere piano arpeggios and saturnine clarinets while the impressionistic Comb Jellies finds an Eric Satie-esque flute melody perfectly mirroring the decorous sashaying of medusa jellyfish. Plucked kotos conjure the avian Orient with similar deftness on the self-explanatory Japanese Macaques – Warm Baths in a Snowscape.
It all makes for a woozy, wonderstruck album that, not unlike Attenborough himself, evokes the exotic and the awe-inducing with disarming subtlety and ineffably British understatement. No wonder Radiohead have lately been expressing their esteem for it. --David Sheppard
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Customer Reviews
You'd also think that the frequently short passages would make it something of a bitty experience, but not at all. I'm sitting here now in semi-darkness as the November afternoon fades away, and it's woven a mood such that I can't be bothered yet to get up and switch the lights on (which is making it really hard to type this review). So I'll stop there. It's lovely, and if it does bring the series back for you, so much the better :-)
There's no doubting Johnny Trunk's dedication to the cause. The journey undertaken to bring about the release of the Life On Earth soundtrack was both torturous and long. Although, this is probably neither the time nor place to discuss the `hows' and `wherefores' (check out the Trunk Records website where I'm sure the tale will be printed in full).
So, the Life On Earth soundtrack. Composed by Edward Williams for the original 1979 series, the music will seem instantly familiar to those of us who grew up with David Attenborough's groundbreaking nature series, though for the vast majority, this'll be the first time we've had the chance to really listen to the extraordinary and utterly lovely music without the distraction of luscious visuals and animal cries. Of course, the mind's eye instantly conjures up images of bug-eyed amphibians, foraging rodents and various gamboling cuddlies, and that's the real beauty of this remarkable soundtrack. It sounds just like nature. The glorious sort.
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