3 out of 5

Label: ?

Produced by: ?

Looking over Ramin Djawadi’s discography, you’ll see he started in the Zimmer trenches doing a lot of “additional” work on scores by Hans or Klaus Badelt, then started making a name for himself in the horror / thriller genre, generally on sub-blockbuster movies, before his TV work (e.g. Game of Thrones) would leverage him up in name recognition, and have him consistently juggling big projects. Throughout this long journey, and stemming back truly to the start of Djawadi’s solo works, are a string of scores for Belgian animation studio nWave’s movies; House of Magic was the fourth such project.

These are interesting scores. A lot of Ramin’s earlier stuff had a more experimental bent to it before he established a more general sound, around which he can push and pull on elements depending on the project; with the nWave stuff, given that they’re normally cookie-cutter kid movies, you kinda get what you’d expect there – somewhat generically buoyant tunes – but also Ramin would seemingly use these scores as vehicles for trying out more of that experimental side. It’s not in your face – he sticks to the kid movie vibe – but there are experiments with tone and genre that simply wouldn’t work as well in a more serious or mainstream film. For The House of Magic, there’s an interesting blend of unique analog (sounding) instrumentation with digital elements that reminds very much of N64-era platforming, like Peter McConnell’s Psychonauts score of Banjo Kazooie-era Grant Kirkhope, sitting alongside more typical orchestral fare. Storywise, without having seen the film, there’s the sense of plot sections stitched together with action / adventure set pieces – which I realize sounds like many movies, but I’m thinking the actual transitions here are maybe lacking – where the more routinely scored moments are used for dialogue, and the Ramin would let loose for the action. While this provides for some really wild sections (Snack Attack, at the midway point, jumps through like 18 different genres in its 2.5 minutes), it also means the score as a whole doesn’t necessarily stick together outside of a theme which appears towards the beginning and end. At the same time, the way the movie seems to embrace some sci-fi, fantasy, and horror allows Ramin to do the same, and that bevy of approaches plus an appreciative “let’s see what sticks” composition style (and admittedly relatively short runtime; the whole score runs 32 minutes) makes this worth a spin.