Karl Bartos
★★★
The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari
BUREAUB. CD/DL/LP
Former Kraftwerk man gets to grips with a Weimar Republic cinema classic.
There’s an aptness to Karl Bartos writing a new soundtrack for the benchmark 1920 German expressionist silent film The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari. He was in Kraftwerk, whose warping of realism was akin to that achieved by director Robert Wiene. Bartos styles his new work as “narrative film music and sound design”. The 76-minute suite mixes longer pieces for the film’s major story elements with shorter, impressionistic segments for its linking sections. Despite working with a computer, he balances Stravinsky-like tension, Schoenberg-esque atonality and the classicism of Mozart to harmonise with the film’s off-balance nature. There are precedents: the UK’s Geoff Smith created a soundtrack in 2003; two decades earlier, Bill Nelson wrote music for a stage adaptation. Yet – even without the visuals – Bartos’s aural bricolage stands apart due to its instinctive drama, a quality shared with the on-screen imagery.