There is a big song and dance in the press release surrounding these works: the music is a soundtrack to images, and "is the music incomplete without the images?" etc. Personally, I kinda hate program notes that overshadow the actual work (guilty as charged for half of my undergraduate pieces) and tell us what we should be hearing / seeing; often, the grandstanding is in place to make up for a lackluster work. That is not the case with Motion Picture Sound Essay.

Polish Radio Experimental Studio veteran / tape music pioneer Eugeniusz Rudnik and engineer Marcin Lenarczyk have put together a score of sorts that does feel like a journey across space (and time). Mixed with dialog about art and experimental music is a sound design mix tape that would feel at home in David Lynch dream sequences. Grand processed gestures curl up — and sometimes argue — with field recordings from unrecognizable locales and juxtaposed editing and crossfades that Negativland might offer.

From the spiraling "Intro," the listener is ripped from soaring, innocuous high-frequency flute-like drones into jarring synthetic thunder claps and back to whistling electronic blobs. The brief "The Physicality of a Tape" elides the piece with a piano lid slam, applause and lecture hall discourses before leading into manipulated freeway sounds on "Tutorial." "Stome (sic) is Musical Material" features resampled rock and glass clinking that build into a cacophony of dive bombs and more verbal commentary. For "I Illuminited (sic)" the duo conjure a looping string symphony (through a delay pedal) whose harmonic world and mood lives in the Arvo Pärt universe.

The music continues to vary over these sonic elements throughout while introducing other ideas to keep your mind from wandering too far (though that is probably the point of this record). "Warsaw Mists-Collage" includes panning bursts of unidentified jazz band samples mingled with variety show blips; typewriter and booming low brass compete together on the woozy "Inventory of Listeners Accociations [sic] / Music;" the hyperactive "Electromeadow" incorporates an alien frog pond with equally extraterrestrial voices. The finale, "Closing Credits," begins with the most "musical" portions on the disc as pizzicato strings almost fall into a Flamenco dance while a raspy drone supersedes to remind us of the composer's altered reality of, in his words, "rejected sounds."