Cloud Atlas: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek, Reinhold Heil | Format: MP3 Music

Product Details

• Original Release Date: October 23, 2012
• Label: WaterTower Music
• Copyright: 2012 WaterTower Music / Warner Bros. Entertainment / Cloud Atlas Productions GmbH / X Filme Creative Pool GmbH
• Total Length: 1:17:25
• Genres:
  • Classical
  • Soundtracks
• ASIN: B009JCL58G
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #705 Paid in MP3 Albums (See Top 100 Paid in MP3 Albums)
  • #28 in MP3 Downloads > MP3 Albums > Soundtracks

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

86 of 88 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Sublime music that links past, present and future October 29, 2012

By Jon Broxton

Format:MP3 Music

Trying to write a brief synopsis of Cloud Atlas is an exercise in futility, given that it is one of the most dense, multi-layered, and complicated - but brilliant - films in several years, but I'll give it a go. It's based on David Mitchell's sprawling 2004 novel, and at it's core is a story about humanity's continual yearning for freedom in all its forms, the way in which the threads of life are interlinked across time and space, and how the smallest gestures in one lifetime can have enormous and profound effects on generations to come. The film spans six separate time periods across multiple geographical locations, and even different genre. Contrary to appearances, these disparate elements all do connect with each other, having been expertly woven together by directors Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, who worked separately on three segments each, which were then edited together to form the final cut of the film. It stars an ensemble cast including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Jim Sturgess, Hugo Weaving, Ben Whishaw, Susan Sarandon and Hugh Grant, all of whom play multiple roles across the different stories, under varying applications of hair, false noses and prosthetic teeth.

Music plays a very important part in Cloud Atlas, forming a great deal of the narrative's connective tissue, linking themes and concepts across multiple segments and multiple genres. The music is by the composing trio Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil, who have worked together on several of director Tykwer's films, most notably Run Lola Run, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and The International, and go by the collective name `Pale 3'.

Intellectually and structurally, the score for Cloud Atlas is a masterpiece, with everything being built from its two core elements, the "Cloud Atlas Sextet" and the "Atlas March". In the film, the Sextet is written by the fictional composer Robert Frobisher in the 1930s segment, but the music contained within it extends its tendrils into at least two other portions of the film, influencing the fate of one character, and coming back in circular fashion as an inspiration for itself in the past by way of a dream about the future. It's an intentionally classical-sounding piece, emanating from a recurring 7-note melody that swoons and weaves its way around the various parts of the string section, moving from one lead instrument to another, while the orchestra swoops and flies around it in various expressive counterpoints. It's very beautiful, and certainly fits the screenplay's notion of it being a work of art whose impact spans many generations, endlessly fascinating those who hear it.

The Atlas March, meanwhile, is a hesitantly romantic piano piece which carries a slight sense of melancholy, and is first heard in the opening cue, but appears in numerous guises thereafter. This piece seems to signify the importance of the recurring relationships within the film, romantic or otherwise; characters whose paths cross in one time period, do so again decades or hundreds of years in the future, and this music that accompanies them on their almost pre-destined encounters seems to suggest a cosmic order to things, of past lives influencing the present.

In an attempt to give each segment its own identity, each one features a slightly different palette of instruments, ranging from modern action scoring and electronic elements to large and vivid statements for the full orchestra, choral textures and much more. The most overtly classical style of music tends to be most prominent in the segments set in either the past or the distant future, while the more contemporary and neo-futuristic scenes draw influence from jazz music and more progressive synthesized textures and colors.

The "Opening Title" underscores part of what is, chronologically, the sixth piece, an action/sci-fi segment set 300 years into a post-apocalyptic future in which the human race has become a band of pidgin-speaking hunter-gatherers tormented by vicious hunting tribes, but whose fortunes change when they are visited by intellectual aliens looking for keys to their own past. The cue features a superb, enticing, almost hypnotic motif for guitar and harp, under which the first subliminal allusions to the Sextet appear on soft, undulating strings. At the other end of the scale, cues such as "Sloosha's Hollow", "Won't Let Go", "Catacombs" and "The Message" are a dark combination of orchestral, vocal and electronic textures and dissonances which occasionally explode into powerful, vivid action sequences to accompany the rampaging attacks of a cannibal tribe, but which are tempered with more supernatural-sounding choral textures that try to capture the benevolence of the advanced civilization that visits the battered, broken world. These cues often contain recurring echoes of the opening title, especially in the continued use of the guitar motif.

The historical parts of the film - a waterborne drama set in the 1830s on a galleon in the Caribbean featuring a young businessman, a freed slave and a murderous doctor, and a 1930s homosexual romance centered around an English composer trying to write the perfect symphony - is underscored with the pretty pizzicato-cum-scherzo effects of "Travel to Edinburgh", the slightly skewed performance of the Atlas March on piano underneath the otherwise frantic-sounding cue for Frobisher's conductor "Kesselring", and the bold and lush "Temple of Sacrifice", which presents an effusive, fully-orchestrated statement of the Atlas March. The relationship between the composer Frobisher, his lover Sixsmith, and the elderly composer Vyvyan Ayrs, is the most overly romantic and melodramatic sequence of the film, and also the most musically important, as it is in this sequence that the Cloud Atlas Sextet is actually written on-screen, although its musical influences lie elsewhere in the timeline.

The political thriller segment, which is set in San Francisco in the 1970s and concerns an investigative journalist digging into the shady dealings of a corrupt nuclear power plant, tends to be a little more modernistic in style, and a little more subdued and less florid than the `classical' pieces, but still retain a predominantly orchestral core. Cues such as "Luisa's Birthmark" and the propulsive "Chasing Luisa Rey" feature light, glassy electronic textures and contemporary, occasionally jazzy orchestral timbres, with the barest hints of the Sextet motif buried underneath. The hints of the Sextet theme are cleverly carried on from the 1930s segment, and musically illustrate the links between Luisa Rey and the elderly Sixsmith.

Later, the modern-day segment featuring the vaguely comedic escapades of the bumbling but likeable Timothy Cavendish, a hapless book publisher trying to escape from a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest-like care home, have an almost circus-esque quality, with hooting woodwinds and Nino Rota or Wojciech Kilar-style rhythms in "Cavendish in Distress" and "Adieu" underscoring his chaotic adventures.

The segment set in the dystopian-totalitarian Korean future, a in which a genetically engineered waitress initiates a rebellion, embraces electronic scoring much more prominently, with cues such as "Papa Song" having an ultra-modern sound design element for the ghastly restaurant where the waitresses work. The largest action sequences occur in this segment too, with cues such as "Sonmi-451 Meets Chang", the exciting "The Escape", the powerful "New Direction", and the gripping "Sonmi's Discovery" building up a real head of steam, while making some clever allusions to both the Sextet theme and the Atlas March in the string ostinatos. "Sonmi-451 Meets Chang" also introduces an unexpectedly lyrical theme for the forbidden affair that develops between the two unlikely lovers, making their plight that much more moving, and the choral work in this cue is quite excellent.

One or two cues even span multiple styles, notably "All Boundaries Are Conventions", which presents a superb performance of the Atlas March in various different manifestations; it begins classically, as if re-imagined by Johann Sebastian Bach, but gradually works in the humming male voice choir often heard in the future segments, and builds to a large-scale finale. The final three pieces on the album - "Cloud Atlas Finale", "The Cloud Atlas Sextet for Orchestra" and the "Cloud Atlas End Title" - take the two central themes and many of the various elements heard in all six segments, and significantly increase their scope and size, presenting concert-worthy performances that stand as some of the best cues heard all year, often incorporating with a haunting choral element reminiscent of the best parts of their score for Perfume.

The way in which these two thematic elements cross-pollinate each of the six sections of the film really ties together the core idea that the movie is trying to convey: that, irrespective of location, or time, or race or gender, the hopes and dreams and aspirations of humanity remain the same. There's also a recurring theme of rebirth and resurrection, whereby the same characters (or ancestors/descendents of the same characters) are destined to re-encounter across the ages. By continually presenting re-orchestrated and re-worked variations of these two themes - either with overt statements, or little rhythmic allusions in the music's underbelly - the connections that link a freed slave on a ship in the 1830s and a humble tribesman four hundred years in the future become clear. Read more ›

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Awe inspiring score October 23, 2012

By J. Chrisman

Format:MP3 Music|Amazon Verified Purchase

I haven't seen Cloud Atlas, and hence cannot comment on the interplay between the music and the movie, so I will restrict my comments to the standalone quality of the score:

While the music from the action scenes is fairly typical of what you would hear in other contemporary movies, the real strength of the Cloud Atlas album is in the main theme - "The Atlas March". For those that watched the 5 minute trailer for the movie, "The Atlas March" is the opening music for the trailer (and first track of this album), which is rounded out by M83's "Outro".

I'm a fairly avid movie score collector and it's not often that you come across a theme so awe inspiring and refreshing - kudos to the trio of composers on a job well done!

Notable tracks (favorites*)

1) Prelude: The Atlas March*
3) Travel to Edinburgh
10) Kesselring
16) All boundaries are conventions*
18) Chasing Luisa Rey
20) Death is only a Door
21) Cloud Atlas Finale*
23) Cloud Atlas End Title*

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent October 25, 2012

By C. Kline

Format:MP3 Music

Having seen this movie at the US Premiere, I may have been most looking forward to the score (even though the 6 1/2 minute trailer intrigued the heck out of me). I have loved everything this music team has put together thus far (and am a huge fan of Tykwer's films). The score is another wonderful addition, with a simultaneously simple, sweeping and haunting main theme, perhaps best represented in "Cloud Atlas Opening Title", "All Boundaries are Conventions" and the amazing "Cloud Atlas Finale". This and a few other themes will stick in your head long after the film concludes and this soundtrack is destined to be in my rotation for months to come. My favorite soundtrack of the year so far. (I loved the movie as well.)