Late last year, two head-scratching, ear-gouging soundtracks from the massive back catalog of the Sun City Girls, Dulce and Piasa, were reissued on CD, shedding light on the Seattle trio's long-held obsession with film and film music. Scanning the band's Web site reveals a soundtrack section featuring surefire drive-in classic titles like Guns of El Chupacabra, Larry Clark's Another Day in Paradise, and a few short films that have either never been released or have quickly disappeared into the arthouse ether. (The entry for Karen Young's 1995 short The Pesky Suitor notes that young actress Claire Danes makes her film debut to the strains of The Girls' "Space Prophet Dogon," from the epochal and out of print Torch of the Mystics.)

This spring, along with separate cues and contributions from Spiritualized's J. Spaceman, The Sun City Girls recorded a soundtrack for enfant terrible Harmony Korine's latest film, Mister Lonely. Released by Drag City, the soundtrack bolsters an oddball story about a community of celebrity impersonators (Michael Jackson, Madonna, Shirley Temple, Charlie Chaplin, etc.), skydiving nuns, and the other inscrutables that always comprise a Korine joint. With such an excuse, how could we not talk to the Sun City Girls' Alan Bishop about working with Korine, and about the Maestro himself, Italian soundtrack composer Ennio Morricone?

Q: With Sublime Frequencies curation and whatnot, it always slips my mind that you are an Ennio Morricone fiend of the highest order, having curated the Crime & Dissonance set that Ipecac released a few years back.

A: My Italian soundtrack collection, I'm always re-revising that and doing comps. The last two days, up until you called, I was backing up my Morricone stuff so that I can go through it again. There's a possibility that Ipecac will want to do another Crime & Dissonance set. There are a lot of unreleased things in his back catalog, especially in the '60s, a ton of stuff that hasn't been heard.

Q: What movie turned you onto the Maestro in the first place?

A: As it must have been for many my age, it was The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly. I was eight or nine years old when I saw it for the first time and it was a combination of the music, the actors, and the film. I was hooked for life.

Q: Can you recall your physical reaction to his music?

A: No, not really, that was 40 years ago. It took over my mind for a while... at first it was all those Leone western themes. ...When I heard them, I felt immortal. They embodied "music as a talisman" for me. Music as a psychological, mental, spiritual, and physical weapon. They still work that way for me.

Q: Is it even possible to grasp the full breadth of Morricone and what he's done over the last half-century?

A: I'm a lot closer than most, but only the Maestro himself knows the whole deal. Many people have no idea that, along with scoring films, he spent the first half of the '60s composing, arranging, and conducting hundreds of songs for the most famous Italian pop singers of the period like Gianni Morandi, Rita, Christy, Gino Paoli, Mina, Neil Sedaka, Paul Anka—the list goes on and on. And his arrangements for them are off the scale and much more advanced and maverick than what was happening elsewhere at the time.

Some have called him the father of the modern pop arrangement. No one was more clever at arranging pop songs than Morricone from 1962-1966. Most of those tracks are extremely hard to find (which you'd have to hear to see what I mean), but some have been reissued on BMG Japanese CD box sets—others are probably available on Italian '60s CD comps you could still find in Italy, but they don't always list Morricone as the arranger/composer/conductor on the inserts. Throw in his 400-plus soundtrack scores for film and TV, his improv/experimental work, chamber music, and concert music, and you've got an endless research project staring you in the face.

Q: I am going to presume that he is your favorite soundtrack composer, but who are some others that you like?

A: Other Italian composers from the '60s/'70s including Piccioni, Nicolai, Ferrio, Travajoli, Alessandroni, Bacalov, Umiliani, Cipriani, to name a few. John Barry, Lalo Schifrin, Francis Lai, Asei Kobayashi, the great film composers from India, so many others. Bernard Herrmann is amazing.

Q: Who is the most underappreciated of the set?

A: Most soundtrack composers I've ever been interested in are supremely underappreciated. Many are still relatively unknown today. Their names get thrown around a lot as references and influences, but only a tiny fraction of each composer's body of work is accessible, and the rest very few have heard. How many people really collect and know soundtrack music the same way they'd know pop or rock music, or even jazz? Not very many. So really, it's a question of who's the most underappreciated of the already underappreciated world of soundtrack composers. And that list is a long one.

Q: The past few SCG CD reissues have been soundtracks, like Dulce and Piasa, but they are somewhat imaginary soundtracks, in that-as the liner notes say—there is no longer any extant film for them. How crucial then is it for the music to offer conveyance of its own, made for images yet separate from them?

A: Absolutely crucial. Many films suck, but the music is brilliant. There is always the possibility that music created separately from the images can work as well or better than music which was made specifically for the images. There are many variables involved in the process and the decisions are ultimately in the hands of the filmmaker, not the composer or musician.

Q: Stemming from the above quote, I'm curious as to how you approached work on Mister Lonely. Were the Sun City Girls contributions to the soundtrack created in conjunction with the film's images? Or did you guys just play separately and then had it melded together by Korine?

A: We worked on material by reading the script, asking Harmony for some basic ideas/ moods he was aiming for, and without seeing any images. Then later, we composed a few short cues for clips he sent to us he was having some trouble with musically.

Q: What is your favorite scene of the film?

A: There are many. "The Pope stinks" scene, the skydiving nuns, and the slow-motion Marilyn scene are all great.

Q: How did this experience differ from working on Korine's film about David Blaine (for BBC2)? Didn't you guys contribute to that short film as well?

A: On the Blaine film, he merely chose an already existing SCG track for his intro cue.

Q: Those strains of Bobby Vinton's elegiac "Mister Lonely" are haunting and evocative, and on the soundtrack, you guys do a gorgeous instrumental take on the song with longtime collaborator Eyvind Kang. Did the Bobby Vinton cover stem from Korine originally or from your end?

A: Harmony wanted us to try "Mister Lonely" in case he couldn't get the original, or as an experiment. We did several takes of miscellaneous instrumentation and vocals. We even had Herb Diamante sing lead on the main vocal version—it came out great and Herb will be using that version on his new record.

But Harmony ended up getting the original Vinton song after all, and who can blame him? The Polish prince must be sitting on a beach somewhere thinking to himself: "David Lynch... Harmony Korine... American directors title their films after my songs!"

Crime & Dissonance [Ipecac Records]
Mister Lonely - Trailer [YouTube]

The day is fast approaching when—come 6 a.m. Chinese Standard Time—fans of both experimental architecture and government-controlled television will come together over Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren's Office for Metropolitan Architecture-erected China Central Television (CCTV) headquarters in Beijing. Dubbed "the twisted doughnut" by adherents and detractors alike, the 575,000-square-meter cantilevered structure, still being built, will have its steel joints from two separate towers sutured together in that magic-hour light.

Having recently visited Beijing with a few friends, I missed out on a chance to witness such history being made, though there is solace to be taken in that with Beijing's steel-colored (and similarly opaque) smog, I couldn't have glimpsed the damned CCTV structure anyway. As a consolation prize, our group instead whiled away many jetlagged hours in our Beijing hotel room watching CCTV 6 at ungodly times. Not that we could translate the pictographic language, but we deemed this channel "The Kung Fu Channel" because at almost any time, one could tune in to see ridiculous wire work, flurries of hand chops, a young Jet Li and/or Gordon Liu dispensing fleet feet of justice, and animal-based fighting styles of infinite varieties.

One particular Tsingtao-sodden night, our group caught a Jackie Chan flick at 3 a.m. It is here that I give thanks to the archetypal Hong Kong Kung-Fu framework: baleful kung-fu master (in this case portrayed by Hwong Jang Lee); elderly teacher who still opens cans of whip-ass (Yuen Siu Tien); Jackie Chan as a doofus who nevertheless haphazardly learns how to issue a beatdown; vengeance gained via arduous training and the deployment of ancient fighting styles. Were it not for such tropes, I might've never figured out this movie. There were subtitles, but a good 2/5ths of them were clipped on either side, and judging from the transfer, which was so distorted that it verged on the psychedelic, it seems that we watched a sixth-generation VHS dub from the early '80s. It was only via the Internet that I even gleaned the film's title: Snake In The Eagle's Shadow, bashed out in 1978 by action choreographer-turned-director Yuen Woo-ping, who would gain renown in the West for choreographing the martial arts sequences for little films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Matrix, and Kill Bill.

Snake in the Eagle's Shadow remains the craziest Jackie Chan movie I've witnessed—even moreso than Rush Hour 3 (that's not just the Tsingtao and plum wine talking). Audacious fight scenes aside, what pushes Eagle's Shadow over the top is its soundtrack. While the credits list Chou Fu-liang as composer, the film liberally rips off its incidental music from elsewhere. My drunken first encounter made me think of Italian maestros like Goblin and Ennio Morricone—for the better part of the flick, the soundtrack toggles between Moogy arpeggios and more poignant strings, earmarks of those two artists. A bit more research though makes me realize that rather than emulate Goblin (which may have been too much work for the HK industry), the "composer" simply bit Jean-Michel Jarre's "Oxygene Pt.2" unabashedly. In this training sequence (embedding disabled, sorry), the Morricone choirs give way to Jarre.

The choicest bit of the soundtrack isn't music, but a cheap sound effect. It's brought into the movie soon after Jackie Chan's ne'er-do-well character, Chien, has had his Snake Fist technique falter against the malefic Eagle's Claw fighting style. Sullen, he returns home to see his housecat locked in mortal combat with a hooded cobra. My friends and I figured that the production went through three stunt cats in shooting this sequence, though a non-venomous snake may have been the cheaper option. Surely Garfield is getting it, but it turns out that kitty's got claws. As an astounded Chan looks on, this mere housecat slays the deadly cobra and in the process teaches Jackie Chan a new fighting style: Cat's Claw.

Awkwardly—yet inexplicably awesomely montaged—this fight scene between snake and kitty isn't scored by Jarre, but rather the sound of a cat. It's no simple "meow," but instead the cougar-screech that a cat makes when, say, you hold it by the tail over a full bathtub and shake—only layered, heavily compressed, and flanged to devastating effect. On any occasion when Chan clenches his fist into the Cat's Claw position, that sick-ass sound rings out. Chan mows down the practitioners of the Eagle's Claw.

Jackie Chan unveils his new style about 3:20 into the climactic final fight (a sequence so intense that Hwong Jang Lee actually kicked out Chan's front tooth during filming). And when that cat screech gets juxtaposed with the galloping Jarre track, it's the perfect meeting between East and West.

Sources tell me that Dion has been booked to perform at this year's Academy Awards. The Canadian crooner will sing during a tribute to legendary composer Ennio Morricone, who will be receiving an honorary Oscar at the Feb. 25 ceremony.

I'm told lyrics have been written for Morricone's score for Once Upon a Time in America just for Dion. "The lyrics have never been heard before," one source says.

We realize Dion hasn't performed at the Oscars in a few years, and that the bigwigs at the Academy probably feel that they need to fill their Celine-quota, but really—couldn't she have filled in for James Taylor instead?

Celine Nabs Another Date with Oscar [E!]
[Photo: Getty Images]