HOWARD STELZER “The Crossing: Official Motion Picture Soundtrack” C40 (Flag Day Recordings)


“The Crossing” is the soundtrack to a film by Joe Taylor that hasn’t been made yet. I’ve linked to the Indiegogo page below in case you’re interested in the film, which is a “dark western tale of desertion, betrayal, and retribution set in 1865 America.” I’d check that out.

“The Crossing: Official Motion Picture Soundtrack” by Howard Stelzer captures that “dark western tale of desertion, betrayal, and retribution set in 1865 America,” playing unbroken like the vast stretches of wasteland and desert in the American West. Composed with an eye toward windswept vistas, “The Crossing” soundtrack lives and breathes, giving definition to the setting and making it as much of a character as the leads. You can taste the dry dust on your tongue, smell the open air, and see the smatterings of cloud formations flitting across the intense blue sky.

Ambient by necessity, the score serves as a backdrop to the action (none of which, admittedly, I’ve seen), and there’s blood at the edges of the synthetic string (I’m guessing) arrangements. There’s death in the hills and in the desert, the terrain wild and untamed and daunting to the weary pioneer and the fugitive alike. Stelzer captures this tone effortlessly, hovering high above the action like an omnipresent entity observing but unable/unwilling to intervene. It all plays out in the end, like it’s supposed to happen. The film may be finite, but the land and the sky endures.





--Ryan