Heavens above, this one comes so packed with goodness it’s hard to know where to start. Like a Whiskas Pure Delight fish selection, this burst of retro loveliness provides everything you and your cat need nutritionally for a healthy and happy life.
From Twin Peaks dreamy moodiness to spaghetti Western Ennio Morricone twang, to soaring strings and a bass sound to make Klaus Johann Grobe faintly envious, Fabio Frizzi – known to generations of Mondo movie heads as the go-to soundtrack artist for Lucio Fulci and, occasionally, Lamberto Bava – has here crafted five perfect little musical jewels to adorn not a movie, but a comic book.
When I say ‘comic book’, however, I’m not referring to the Beano (fun as that would be), but instead to a reissue of the titular work by twin legends Alejandro Jodorowsky (film-maker, poet, spiritual seeker, psychonaut, writer, mover, shaker, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch) and French artist Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud.
First issued in France in 1978, The Eyes Of The Cat saw Jod collaborating with Moebius for the first time in print,i the latter once saying in interview that the work was an example of the “effective horror story”, one in which the genre is a soaring night-bird of prey stalking the reader in an effort to awaken them and open their eyes. Given that the Jodmeister once himself said that he “wanted to make [Dune] something sacred, a film that gives LSD hallucinations without taking LSD, to change the young minds of all the world”, you know that anything from the MCU would look like a paper on tax law reform by comparison.Like other titles from the Jod-Moebius cannon,ii The Eyes Of The Cat is now reissued in glorious hardcover, with Frizzi commissioned (this is Jod remember) to give it its own bespoke soundtrack. And what a joy it is. Clocking in at a lean twenty-seven minutes, Frizzi chose to rummage through his attic and dig out some of his old kit, such that many of the synthesizers used here were also those which soundtracked the films on which he worked with Fulci. Augmented by acoustic guitars, dun-tish vintage syn-drums and electric bass, the atmosphere of the piece is rich and warm, a tapestry of different moods and styles, all spread across the five tracks in a perfectly-modulated series of vignettes.
Opening track “The City” is a sweeping neo-noir introduction, and brooding second piece “The Cat” instantly evocative of insane late ’70s / early ’80s Italian psychotronic cinematography, discounted Anglophone actors wandering around totally non-plussed at how they have got themselves mixed up in all this and baffled at how they are now speaking badly-dubbed Italian (take a bow David Hemmings and James Franciscus). Sitting in the middle is the beautiful “Meduz And The Crime”, intermingling luscious strings, Angelo Badalamenti-style synth and Alessandro Alessandroni-esque guitar so seamlessly it’ll leave you purring. “The Macabre Flight” is a melancholy delight, and closer “The Child” a mini-suite in itself, moving from brooding and rhythmic to sparse and elegant and back again.However you want to approach this, reading the comic as you listen, or savoured just for the music itself, this is a superior release from an old hand who has been around the track more times than Tiddles has had a bowl of GoCat.
In tests, eight out of ten owners said their cats preferred it.-David Solomons-
i For the full glorious, madcap details of their initial meeting, see the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune.
ii The Incal (1980-1988) is a must-read, in which many of the ideas from the abandoned Dune project finally got at least some exposure.
