So here’s a question for you – what do Soviet avant garde movies have in common with cutting edge UK dance music. Stuck? The answer is “The Man With The Movie Camera” and The Cinematic Orchestra. 

J Swinscoe’s TCO have been described as “classy and cerebral, but atmospheric and soulful too” (NME). They are one of the few bands of the last few years to successfully fuse contemporary studio production techniques with fantastic live playing, their take on jazz and film soundtracks fused together with a thoroughly modern sampler-generation attitude. And in their notional leader, J Swinscoe, they have a man who is as concerned with how sound looks, so to speak, as with how it sounds… 

In late 1999, Swinscoe was asked by the organisers of the Porto European City of Culture 2000, if the band wanted to score a soundtrack to a silent movie to open the celebrations. It seemed a perfect opportunity to expand the ideas of TCO into the world which had given them their name. But the difference was this was for a one off live performance. The film was Dziga Vertov's ‘Man With A Movie Camera,’ a 1929 early documentary cinema film from the Soviet Union. The performance in a old theatre space in Porto ended with a standing ovation of 3,500 people. Since that evening TCO have performed the score live at film festivals from Turkey to Scotland. 

But the work also had a formative influence on the album that was to become ‘Every Day’. Certain tracks that made it on to the album were written specifically for the score, but more than that it made Swinscoe and the band think in terms of combining sounds and textures and unfolding narratives over a period of time using those sounds. In particular, the title 'Every Day' was based on the narrative in the film, which portrays a day in the life of an idealised Soviet society, starting fom people waking up in the morning, moving through various work place ideas, then into leisure time and then back into the cinema... 

Ninja Tune are proud to present ‘Man With A Movie Camera’, a soundtack released on DVD, CD and LP. The DVD also features a short documentary about the making of the record (first aired on C4), the superb video to “All That You Give” (featuring Fontella Bass) and further extras. Its a great package, and not just for Cinematics fans or scholars of 30s documentaries! 

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