Luboš Fišer - Valerie And Her Week of Wonders OST (1973/2006 Remastered Edition)
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Album: Luboš Fišer - Valerie And Her Week of Wonders OST (aka Valerie A Týden Divu)
Released: 1973 (2006)
Genre: Folk-, Chamber-Prog, Soundtrack Music
Gnosis Rating: Not rated
Finders Keepers FKR009CD
Czech new wave bloodlusting vampire psychedelia. Ah, the charming mystery of being a woman. The score is small ensemble, with acoustic bits that make it perfect for Wicker Man fans, plus harpsichord, organ & a couple of bell tolls. - Weirdo
Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders has transcended film, its country of origin, and everything that tethers it to a specific time and place. It is a cultural touchstone that will continue to find relevence as long as people sustain the ability to live firee, lovefireely and dream outside all boundaries. - Greg Weeks, ESPERS
Totally Amazing. Finders Keepers deserve a medal for releasing this! - Michael Tyack, CIRCULUS
Not since The Wicker Man has a soundtrack occupied my mind like Valerie and her Week of Wonders. It was like a door had been opened in my subconscious and fragments of memories and dreams rejoiced right there in my living room. I became very possessive over my copied version, a VHS to cassette copy which hissed like it had been captured from another world. I would surprise friends with snippets of the theme, it never failed to get a curious "Who's this?" I was continually asked to make a copies but I had no intentions of making copies for anyone. The ritual chanting, the sections of catholic mass, the czech hymns were mine, the cogs sequence, the acoustic love song, the room of cogs all mine. - Trish Keenan (BROADCAST)
Finders Keepers make musical history once again with what they regard as their very finest, darkest and most magnificent hour as they release the delicately haunting and sacred score to Jaromil Jires' essential Eastern European hallucinogenic-baroque-witch-flick 'Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders'.
It has taken Andy Votel almost 12 years to finally get his grubby vinyl-magnetic mits on the original studio recordings of this previously unreleased score. A futile decade of Eastern European phone calls, continental crate digging and eventually wicked web scouring confirmed that like most Czechoslovakian film scores 'Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders' never benefited from a commercial vinyl release and was condemned to a life imprisoned in the vaults of the original film production company sheltered from political duress and controversy for ever more... until now.
Aided and abetted by his counter cultured compadriats at Finders Keepers a black virgin-vinyl and CD duplication of the original master-tapes are now available for one and all to enjoy courtesy of the men who performed previous death-defying escape missions for Stanley Myers soundtrack music to 'Sitting Target' and providing psychedelic amnesty for buried treasures by Jean-Claude Vannier, Susan Christie and a veritable hoard of progressive Welsh folk music. And what better time and climate to unleash this Baroque folk masterpiece to an audience of bespoke music lovers as now - as our affection for traditional mystic music reaches a healthy hiatus.
Lubos Fiser provides what is perhaps the greatest musical score of all the maligned Czech New Wave feature-films with a gossamer-fragile blend of pastoral-orchestral folk songs and clockwork harpsichords. From the very first delicate chord to the final crescendo this joyous sound is as addictive as the bizarre imagery seen in this seldom celebrated cinematic gem (which was screened in front of 3 hundred mesmerized patrons of this years Green Man festival).
Naturally the list of musical pioneers who freely confess there allegiance to the score verifies it's elevated place in contemporary pop. Birmingham's dedicated concrete-pop-psych combo Broadcast recently paid homage to the soundtrack on there 'Ha-Ha Sound' LP while groups such as Espers, Fursaxa and Marissa Nadler recently contributed to a live performance of the soundtrack as a homage to its unwaning influence on their music. Echoes of the score can also be heard in recent music by Vashti Bunyen and it has been cited as a huge influence to the likes of Tim Burton who based the carnival scene at the end of 'Big Fish' on the original film.
Previously unprepared for public consumption the immaculate release has been compiled in close accordance to the original storyline which was released in 1935 as a surrealist novel by Vladislav Nezval. The orchestral suites of music have been separated into 23 chapters with titles derived from the controversial novella. This seminal release comes complete with unseen archive images, original international poster designs and new and extensive sleevenotes by Andy Votel, Professor Peter Hames and Trish Keenan from Broadcast. - Finders Keepers
Continuing their ongoing mission to seek out old records and boldly go where no crate digger has gone before, the Finders Keepers crew have excavated another utterly essential piece of cinematic history - and this one's right up my street. Sadly I have never seen the film this soundtrack has been disengaged from before (something soon to be remedied, thank you internet shopping) but when you mention Eastern Europe, vampires, perverted monks and sexual discovery my ears and eyes are wide open. The cover itself is a rather fabulous looking blood-spattered daisy... I mean, I don't even have to hear the music and I'm sold - it's just so darned inviting. Luckily the shimmering sounds held captive beneath the legend are even more enticing than I would have realised, perfectly summing up everything I adore about library music, film music and cinema itself. We've got it all here - glockenspiels, choirs, harpsichord, string sections, flutes - every boxed is less ticked, more blotted out with a giant magic marker. Yet not once do the pieces sound overdone or cheesy, there's a tendency in this scene to lavish praise on the more 'ironic' exotic sound of 70s exploitation flicks, the whole porn music sensation. 'Valerie and her Week of Wonders' is no such soundtrack, this is so much more than cheap filler for a bad media party, don't take my word for it though, Trish Keenan from Birmingham's finest exports Broadcast gives her verdict in the liner notes claiming that she loved the film and soundtrack so much she wouldn't even copy it for her friends. I think you probably get the idea - this is life changing stuff, sitting somewhere between folk, psychedelia, choral music, avant garde classical and traditional music. Don't think you can label it though, it's a record you need to hear to truly understand its mystery and awe-inspiring atmosphere - I've said enough... you know what you have to do. - Boomkat
Seventeen year old nymphette Jaroslava Schallerova steals the show in this baroque, surrealist folk tale of a teenage girls dreams and hallucinations as
she experiences her first menstruation.
Repeat encounters with witchcraft, vampires, the living dead, perverted monks, and doppelganger distant cousins punctuate her journey into womanhood as the truth about her families dubious past unfolds before her weeping eyes. Esther Krumbachova's decadent tone fuses mystical flamboyancy with religious uniformity pre-empting her future work on Juraj Herz's 'Morgiana' while cinematographer Jan Curik's pin-point images of stark white bed chambers and smoke drooling, underground, antique laboratories chop and change with close ups of symbolic folk iconography and spooky portraits of rural Czech. A like-for-like adaptation of Vladislav Nezval's surrealist novel of the same name, director Jaromil Jires would take a welcome break from his political expose drama's such as 'The Joke' to direct this poetic, cinematic lullaby which defy's comparison or categorisation.
Lubos Fiser provides what is perhaps the greatest musical score of all the New Wave features with a gossamer-fragile blend of pastoralorchestral folk songs and clockwork harpsichords (Birmingham's dedicated concrete-pop-psych combo ‘Broadcast’ recently paid homage to the soundtrack and echo's of the score can be heard in recent music by Vashti Bunyan. The unreleased soundtrack will be released later this year by 'yours truly' Finders Keepers). The spellbinding carnival scenes at the end of the film also provided the basis for the finale in Tim Burton's 'Big Fish' - b-music
Want to show your French New Wave friends up? Well, throw this Czech New Wave shit in their faces.
In 1970 Valerie and Her Week of Wonders premiered in the Czech Republic during an artistically fruitful time for Czech filmmakers (Milos Forman came from this group of filmmakers). Sadly, the fruits of these labors were starting to scatter about when the Soviets took over in 1968. The music for the phantasmagoric film “Valerie and Her Week of Wonders” sat in a crate somewhere with loads of other banned films. Thanks to a few Web hunters and Finders Keepers Records, who forged a ten year search for this haunting soundtrack, the score for “Valerie and Her Week of Wonders” reached mass distribution in 2006.
Valerie’s story (originally penned in 1932 by Vitezslav Nezval) is a bit demented, dreamy, beautiful and fantastic, according to the liner notes. The film presents the dreamy journey of its protagonist. The same actor that plays a rapist, plays the father, bishop and vampire. The hero, Valerie, drifts through a series of sexual temptations and faces the threat of death (sometimes accompanied by her poet brother) with an air of a dreaming faun. In the soundtrack her innocent dreaming (echoed about by bell chimes and gentle classical guitar riffs) creeps into the monastic, overbearing sounds of organs and violin strings. If the listener ever feels threatened, then the soft stuff comes in. And mirroring a classic fantasy story, chorales fit for a parade procession mark new points in the plot.
Ebbing and flowing, like most motion picture soundtracks, to the beat of a hero’s journey, “Valerie” is an engaging listen that one could see easily attracting the most fervent of Hobbit haters.
At Waterloo Records in Austin, Texas the lithographic looking cover sat curiously alongside of-the-moment releases by Albert Hammond Jr. and Okkervil River. A dark shadowy figure leers at center, there’s a green backdrop, an innocent, lithe, but maybe guilty looking girl giggling at the beholder and the Czech typescript promises the equivalent of an irreversible absinthe dose.
And it is a mysterious session, fit for the listener’s personal journeys of thought. Opening with jarring bell chimes, the overture “The Magic Yard” floats forward the score’s theme as harpsichord arpeggios sprinkle the background. This theme recurs most beautifully in the track “Brother and Sister” where the brother poet comforts Valerie with acoustic guitar and kind words. Valerie themed bell chimes follow a whirl of woodwinds. Picture a grassy labyrinth in the English moors somewhere during a full moon while listening to the traps and treasures of this record and proper hallucinations may occur. You don’t just have to know the film.
As it turns out, Lubos Fiser’s score is significant today. It has whispered as a muse to some of the most exciting folk and electronic artists (the kind of artists that the British praise in magazines and we hoard in secret like greedy winter bears). Before 2006 the soundtrack and the film were hard to find. But the release coincides with endorsements from Espers and Trish Keenan of Broadcast, who are highly influenced by the Lubos Fiser’s evocative soundtrack.
“For me the power of the score is the recurring dissonant bell that accompanies Valerie and her earrings,” Keenan says. “Pitched outside the key of the soundtrack, the bell symbolizes her ultimate power over the ceremonial pomp; over the indoctrinating religious chord movement. The way both sound worlds battle for central focus reflects the war of belief in the film and competing belief systems in Czechoslovakia in the late ‘60s.”
The listener need not venture further than “The Sermon” to find the emotional core of “Valerie.”
Opening with a jarring bell ring, The Sermon falls dark depths through choir singing, and finally a brooding organ. The bells come again after the Gregorian chant of “Sacrifice.”
Indeed it took a while for this music to find its way into record shops. What in fragments appears as harmless dream music is in theory a tenuous tug of war between art and the larger voices that silence its most sublime expression. Listening to the challenges that face the innocent girl Valerie, one could easily slip into ruminations concerning the war on art. Wherever an oppressive regime, petrified by dissenting opinions, art and debate, reigns over a people, you can be sure as sloth that the artists are the first ones to suffer. It is said artists were the first to leave Iraq.
It is a grace and a gift. This piece of Czech culture has found a home and packaging most comfortable and also reinvigorating. American and English music artists are breathing new life to the work with new translations to Fiser’s score. And with Fiser’s delicate score landing in the hands of a slob like me, one can easily advise starting any world history lesson with the music.
A wikipedia entry says, “In 2006 members of Espers, Fern Night, Fursaxa, The Bitchin' Harp Babes, and other musicians formed the Valerie Project. The group performs original compositions in unison with the film.” - Danny Marroquin, Delusions of Adequacy
The music of Luboš Fišer (1935-99), of course, provides one of the main structural components. He was one of an extraordinarily talented group of Czech composers who wrote the music for Czech films of the 1960s. Others included Zdenek Liška (Marketa Lazarová, The Cremator [Spalovac mrtvol]) and Jan Klusák (Everyday Courage [Každý den odvahu]. Return of the Prodigal Son [Navrát ztraceného syna]). Interestingly enough. Klusák plays the part of the demented missionary. Father Gracián, in Valerie and her Week of Wonders.
Graham Melville-Mason has pointed out that Fišer's musical style was created "...out of his distillation of all the 20th century compositional techniques", with acknowledged influences including Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Martinu. Various writers have characterised his style as based on melody but with complex repetition and modification. It has also been described as possessing an almost atomic energy. Melville-Mason described him, together with Petr Eben, as the Czech Republic's "most successfully distinctive, individual and original contemporary composer".
Despite writing 57 film and television scores, Fišer was also a prolific composer of concert music with an output that included: nine orchestral pieces, nine, concertos, twelve chamber works, eleven for solo instrument (including eight piano sonatas), fifteen vocal and choral pieces, and two operas. The first of his compositions to attract international attention was his Fifteen Pages after Durer's Apocalypse (Patnáct listu podle Dürerovy Apokalypsy, 1965), which won the 1967 UNESCO award, and was followed by performances by the London Symphony Orchestra and BBC Symphony Orchestra among others. He often turned to the past for inspiration in such works as Lament over the Destruction of the City of Ur (Nárek nad zkázou mesta Ur, 1970), and to Sumerian texts for his Istanu (1980).
In Valerie and her Week of Wonders, he uses a whole range of techniques, including choral sections, and individual instruments (flute, harpsichord, harp, guitar, organ, bells). The music illustrates individual themes with very little use of what one might term the "Hollywood dramatic". The arriving missionaries and nuns each have their own choral themes, as do the men who lash themselves with whips, while the figure of Tchor is primarily associated with the organ. Orlík, as poet and musician, offers the opportunity to use individual instruments - indeed he is often seen to be "playing" them. Single instruments often succeed each other in creating an evolving texture. An eerie night-time waltz is conjured up when Tchor and Grandmother dance in a deserted courtyard. A march-like carnival theme heralds the arrival of visiting actors and is used in subsequent collective scenes. However, it is a lullaby ("Good night, my dear. Good night. Sweet dreams") that dominates. It is used throughout in different forms as Valerie escapes from her terrors to her bedroom or the reassurances of Orlík. It is the key indicator that her experiences may be dreams, with the choral version reaching fruition towards the conclusion when the film's narrative (and musical) themes are woven together.
Fišer worked regularly in the cinema from 1965, collaborating with such directors as Karel Kachyna (The Golden Eels/Zlati úhori [TV], 1979; Death of the Beautiful Roebucks/Smrt krásných srncu, 1986), Juraj Herz (Oil Lamps/Petrolejové lampy, 1971; Morgiana, 1972), Pavel Jurácek (A Case for the Young Hangman/Prípad pro zacínajícího kata, 1969), and Antonín Moskalyk (Dita Saxová and A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova/Modlitba pro Katerinu Horovitzovou, 1967). He again worked with Jireš on And Give my Love to the Swallows (...a pozdravuji vlaštovky, 1972), People of the Metro (Lidé z metra, 1974), Island of the Silver Herons (Ostrov stríbrných volavek, 1976), Labyrinth (1991), and Helimadoe (1994) as well as on the television opera The Eternal Faust (Vecný Faust, 1985). He also worked with the Swedish cin-ematographer/director, Sven Nykvist, on The Ox (Oxen, 1991). He won Czech Lions for two of his final film scores - Golet in the Valley (Golet v údolí. Zeno Dostál, 1995) and King Ubu (Král Ubu, F.A. Brabec, 1996). His last score was for the fairy story The Pearl Maiden (O perlové panne. Vladimír Drha, 1997). - Peter Harnes
1 Magic Yard (05:47)
2 Talk With Grandmother (03:55)
3 Letter (01:08)
4 Sermon (02:56)
5 Losing The Way (01:15)
6 Visit (02:13)
7 Work Of Death (01:02)
8 Dinner (01:09)
9 Dense Smoke (01:38)
10 Contract / The Wedding (01:49)
11 Punishment (01:09)
12 Disquiet (01:37)
13 Awakening (00:59)
14 Brother And Sisters (00:58)
15 Sacrifice (02:16)
16 Letter / 2 Friends (01:52)
17 In Flames (01:23)
18 Puppets (01:41)
19 Homeless (01:26)
20 Questions And Answers (02:06)
21 Confession (00:51)
22 Forgiveness (01:28)
23 And The Last (05:07)
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