Dan Romer – The Luck Is Ours Alone

Having recently finished re-bingeing Game Of Thrones, I thought I’d give the new Throneverse series A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms a go.

I just watched the first ep and I like it. It’s well written, well acted and has one of the most undervalued virtues of Game Of Thrones: really stupid jokes. Yes, we remember GoT fondly for its constant barrage of dicks, minges and heads being split open like ripe tomatoes but it was also properly, horribly silly.

As real life is.

So far, in the one ep I’ve seen, AKotSK has that same funereal, venereal whimsy. I was giggling a lot, way more than I have in a while thanks to a certain deranged Mad King who is sorely missing his Jaime Lannister.

As I was watching, I realised that the lightness of everything, the realism of the whole piece was being supremely championed by the score. It took me a while becaus the best soundtrack music, like the best acting, disappears. You don’t notice it, you don’t question it, you are seduced by it and you feel it without use of anything above your medulla oblongata.

Part of my job is to make the unconscious conscious. I can be watching something, submerged in it and then go, ‘hold on, this is a pretty good soundtrack, let’s actually listen to it.’ It isn’t ruining a magic trick, it isn’t pulling the wings off a butterfly, it’s more on the Feynman side of seeing the extra layers of beauty when you look at the patterns underlying its construction.

So, I was already won by the soundtrack. And then the last scene and last track came on and I found my rationality unhorsed, my analysis brutally halted by the end music, The Luck Is Ours Alone. I have no idea why but it started me crying and I’m still not okay now, typing this twenty minutes later.

It moved me like Satie moves me. Or Prokofiev, Carole King, Dowland, Kiasmos or Keith Jarrett move me. All their music is a new maths to me, something from another universe with different rules I can’t comprehend. I can perceive it, just as I can the 2D shadow of a 3D shape but that’s as close as I can get with these ears, with this brain.

I guess I have to add the soundtrack composer for AKotSK to the list above. Well played, Dan Romer. Well played indeed, sir.