Special Notes:

Available as a digital album.

With more than a decade of experience as a musician, editor and synth programmer, Steven Price made a striking impression with Attack the Block (2011), a great blend of percussion and aggressive sounds for the quirky yet gory tale of punk kids saving their hood from ape-like space invaders.

Gravity owes more than a little to Michael Kamen and Orbital’s Event Horizon (1997) where drones and repeated motifs are intertwined like snarling sonic undercurrents. The goal is perhaps to capture the complete disorientation of drifting through a sterile environment with reverberations evoking little glimmers of light, if not glimpses of the safety zones from a drifting space station, but as an album, it’s perhaps a little too dry, if not monochromatic.

There are brief moments of harmony, and Price makes increasing use of a human voice, but Gravity is a very chilly work whose impressionistic design – likely inspired by the static-like mush of space sounds recorded by NASA probes (such as Voyager) - is geared towards specific imagery. Lacking overt dramatic peaks, the album’s first two-thirds kind of meander through the same swirling clouds before there’s a glint of change, and even as the album comes to a close, the score remains rather fuzzy on specific character resolutions.

Presumably within the film’s sound mix, Price’s music co-exists with a hyper-real sound design, and the real dramatic punches come from striking imagery, but as a standalone work, the score feels like an isolated sound element – fascinating to examine with its nuances exposed so starkly, but generally unengaging.

© 2013 Mark R. Hasan