Tarkovsky’s Inner Ear

Released by Cold Spring on September 4, 2026, this vital boxed set gathers remastered soundtracks from director Andrei Tarkovsky’s oeuvre across five CDs. Their passage from Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov’s orchestral writing to Eduard Artemyev’s electronic interiors opens a fissure that continues to emit productive fumes from deep within the core of the earth to this very day. The individually printed sleeves and accompanying artcards, reproducing Soviet and Japanese posters, return these intimate experiences to their public faces. Inside the matte box, however, cinema contracts to the dimensions of a listening body. The change of composers also shifts the terms of attention. Ovchinnikov gives the human voice an analog horizon, while Artemyev lets that horizon infiltrate the voice until its source shades into humanless oblivion. Across this passage, the sacred grows increasingly difficult to distinguish from the material conditions of hearing. An entire landscape can settle behind the…