Underground

"Underground" comes from Kusturica's Palme d'Or-winning film of the same name, and Bregović's score functions as a kind of grotesque musical commentary on Yugoslav history — a national mythology being simultaneously celebrated and dismantled. The piece is built on Balkan brass foundations at their most frenetic, a tempo and density of playing that suggests both celebration and panic simultaneously, the traditional wedding band running on some chemical compound of joy and desperation. The drums drive with unrelenting energy, the brass shouts in unison and then fractures into counterpoint, and the whole ensemble creates a sound that is jubilant and slightly monstrous, appropriately for its thematic context — a country building an underground world to escape history's surface. Bregović's orchestration for this piece draws heavily on the Romani brass band tradition while expanding its harmonic vocabulary and increasing the ensemble size to near-operatic proportions. The film uses this music in scenes of extended, dreamlike celebration that gradually reveal their nightmarish underside, and the music is already doing that work tonally before the images clarify it. For very high volume, or cinema.