Naked Lunch

After spending six months in a darkened hotel room staring at his big toe in Tangiers, the drug addicted beat author Burroughs decides to clean up. He goes cold turkey and gets to work on what would become Naked Lunch.

Howard Shore, Cronenberg’s preferred composer since 1979, managed to capture the fragmented structure and paranoid atmosphere of Burroughs’ writing in the score. Shore entered the studio with none other than free jazz giant Ornette Coleman, who created a number of (solo) pieces for the film including titles such as ‘Bugpowder’, ‘Write Man’ and ‘Intersong’.

Mind expanding

Jazz and fantasy, jazz and horror: seldom do the two combine, however Naked Lunch’s soundtrack proves that symphonic free jazz can bet he means to giving the dark, tortured side of the subconscious free range. Chaos, fear and liberating mind expansion: you can hear them all in Shore and Coleman’s score. In other words: “Save the psychoanalysis for your grasshopper friends”.