Movie music is slice of

And while there's a certain... primitiveness to the look of the film, the soundtrack is super polished.

And how could it not be with a lot of the score music coming from veteran Pop Will Eat Itself front guy Clint Mansell? From the album opener "r2" to the ending "2r", Mansell provides a dark electronic soundscape, appropriate accompaniment for a movie where a number can cause computers to melt down and make stuff grow on your skull.

The entries are variations on a theme, but it's a good enough theme, so no harm there.

Pi
Soundtrack Thrive/Sire 3 1/2 stars Reviewed by Daily Arts Writer Ted Watts

Throughout the album are snippets of dialogue from the film, showing a bit of the Cabalistic/stock market number theory underlying it. It's probably not too far out to suggest that it might be meant to draw your attention to the use of electronic music, which exists as numbers in a synthesizer or a MIDI program, as yet another way or reinforcing the number motif in "".

And of course they haven't skimped on the authors of the number-music. In addition to Mansell everyone from Orbital to Roni Size appears on the soundtrack. Aphex Twin contributes "Bucephalous Bouncing Ball", a high pitched frequency fader, to the melee.

With a weird backwards sounding low end portion, it reflects the movie's articulated confusion pretty well (although it's a bit too happy, and by happy I mean not miserable and feverish).

In spite of the overly professional nature of the soundtrack, this disc fits its movie well.

The numbers that underlie it are also good enough to stand on their own. In a rising flood of electronic music, this would be just about as good an artifact as any to remain on the beach once the movement subsides.

09-09-98