Nick Cave and Warren Ellis 'White Lunar' (Mute) Released 21/09/09

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have in various guises been collaborating for more than fifteen years. ‘White Lunar’, a colossal thirty-three track double CD is a selection of that work, specifically, original compositions for the silver screen, including rare and previously unreleased material, alongside four well placed pieces taken from the Cave & Ellis archives.

Beginning with Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of Ron Hansen’s 1983 novel ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford’ (in which Cave himself guest stars) the collaboration reflects the paranoid isolation, affecting sense of mortality and consuming psychological relationship between Jesse James, his killer and their chased existence across a barren nineteenth century landscape.

Set amid the windblown heat of the colonial outback, it’s approach is paralleled by Cave’s own screenplay, ‘The Proposition’ (directed by John Hillcoat), in which an otherworldly, anxious and skittering ballad centred score, heightens the senses by reflecting the series of events following a horrific rape and family murder. As thematically powerful is the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic Pulitzer Prize winning novel ‘The Road’, due for cinematic release in October 2009, in which a father and son journey across an unrecognisably decimated wasteland, in the vague hope of finding a remnant of civilisation.

Although adept at adding depth to fictitious imagery, the duo also provide unwavering intimacy to the harrowing documentation of Matthew Watson’s ‘The Girls of Phnom Penh’, which explores Cambodia’s shocking yet highly lucrative sex trade, where mothers sell their daughters virginity for as much as $1200. Following the plight of Srey Leak, Me Nea and Cheata, the film and soundtrack voices their story of degradation, brutality, friendship and courage, in one of the worlds poorest nations where the old Khmer Rouge adage “Men are gold, women are cloth” remains.

Leaving Asia for Europe, ‘The English Surgeon’ paints an intimate portrait of eminent brain surgeon Henry Marsh, who regularly divides his time as a consultant in London between the crumbling post-soviet health system of the Ukraine, pitting his moral conscience and ethical frustrations against primitive resources while attempting to save the desperately ill, dying and forgotten.

A picture paints a thousand words; ‘White Lunar’ has none of the former and little of the latter, but the largely instrumental offering, with near constant use of violin, piano, bouzouki, guitar, flute, mandolin and cello, even when taken out of cinematographic context is atmospherically vivid, compelling and thought provoking beyond compare.