HARRY POTTER
AND THE RECYCLED RECORDING ENGINEER
Jack Thorne’s immensely popular two-part play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, has taken up residence in London, New York, and Melbourne, and will soon be in San Francisco (Nov. 2019) and Hamburg (2020). Recording artist and engineer extraordinaire Imogen Heap was hired to create a soundtrack for the stage production. She used her own “Box of Tricks,” an electronic collection of 13 virtual instruments, custom tools FX, 170 presets, and a 30GB library, so you can imagine the wizardry, microcircuitry, and wiring used to create the atmospheric sound behind the players (there’s only one song in five and one-half hours). But if you’re not seeing the play and instead listening to The Music of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, you’re in for an electric shock.
The album from Sony Masterworks is made up of four contemporary “suites” based on each of Potter‘s four acts. Yet Heap also reworked tracks from her back catalog in addition to her original compositions for the play, weaving together “100 moments of music” in 77 minutes. While I can’t imagine listening to it in one sit (I couldn’t — it took weeks to get through the whole thing), it is perfect for having a lie-down in your tanning bed or practicing your latest magic trick or getting stoned with a Glastonbury hippie. Call it Cirque du Ennui.
It’s all spice and no meat, with mid-eastern, classical, Celtic, choral, and electropop flavors that either have some kind of propulsive beat or a moody, reflective aura that becomes a propulsive beat, often with a repetitive two-chord structure in which even the real choruses and instruments sound like they came from a synthesizer. In other words, if it wasn’t for electronic effects and engineering, there would be no music (if there was one theme, I couldn’t locate it for a gander). Certainly, a few of the 42 short tracks calms down to the level of Enya (the soulful “Edge of the Forest” and the Gregorian-like “Expecto Patronum”), but the majority sounds as if Vangelis and Wendy Carlos had a bastard child.
The Music of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Imogen Heap
Sony Masterworks | 1 disc | 77:10 | 42 tracks | released November 2, 2018
available at Amazon, iTunes, and Sony Classical