My Top 1000 Songs #587: The Shining Path

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Here's some quiet, ethereal music that has lived rent-free in my imagination for decades. I think it gets filed under "soundtrack music"--yet it's possible the song's appearance in a film is something that happened only in my imagination.

In contrast to Shriekback's edgy dance music (best exemplified in the amazing, previously-acknowledged "Nemesis"), "The Shining Path"--from 1986's aptly-titled Big Night Music--feels like an update to Brian Eno's mid-70s ambient vocal tracks. It's dark, brooding, and absolutely beautiful. All these years later, it's still got huge emotional pull on me. Weirdly, I kinda associate it with Michael Mann's Manhunter film (the precursor to the more-frequently-invoked Silence of the Lambs). Yet while a few other like-sounding Shriekback tracks were used in the film, I'm not positive this one in fact appeared--it's not on the official soundtrack, and I can't find any reference to it in connection with online film discussions, though it does appear as a bonus track on a deluxe edition of the soundtrack album. So maybe? Regardless, it's a vivid, cinematic piece that would work well in a film.