Morricone’s suite

Morricone’s Suite is a ‘free’ audio-visual interpretation of the many facets of the musician’s extensive production which ultimately stands as a sound track for an entire generation. The installation was presented at the Princesa De Asturias Awards 2020 in Oviedo.

Morricone creates an infinite number of rhythmical images and musical themes that convey the narrative architypes that are so essential to all forms of story-telling: love, conflict, violence, compassion and so forth.

Taking this aspect as its starting point, Karmachina has devised a suite in four tableaus, each of which is built up around quotation of extracts of the original themes, viewed as variations on a range of musical archetypes, to which the codes and techniques of sound design have then been applied. At the same time, iconic shots of classical films are overlaid on the large screen. These are symbolic filmic experiences that are then processed using an unprecedented visual language that highlights their iconic nature within the contemporary imagination, a set of archaic representations of humanity.

The suite opens with the duel archetype, a standard of Morricone’s poetic, where tension and irony fight it out in a crescendo that, with the help of Sergio Leone’s most famed themes, steers us through the Western film period, from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and A Fistful of Dollars right up to The Untouchables and Kill Bill. Then comes seduction, where Eros and voyeurism merge into a lyrical and melancholic vision of feelings and youthful passions, masterfully accompanied by the tunes of Lolita, Once upon a time in America and Malena. Fear, amplified by the dissonant chords and repetitions of the musical theme in John Carpenter’s famous film, that heightens the expectation of an atrocious event that suddenly breaks out after having been both yearned for and feared in the horror films The Thing, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Four Flies on Grey Velvet. And lastly, the power of art in art; after exploring how music can accompany emotions, Morricone’s Suite ends with a rhapsody on how art itself can play a magical role in cinema as a performance art. The tableau opens on Cinema Paradiso and ends, symbolically, with a film where music actually takes a leading role: The Legend of the Pianist on the Ocean.