condition (record/cover): NM / EX+
The original soundtrack to Alain Tanner's No Man's Land (1985), a Swiss-French film about four characters straddling the Franco-Swiss border. Riley recorded the score with Krishna Bhatt on sitar and tabla, plus solo synthesizer, piano and voice tracks. Recorded in Switzerland and produced by Jean-Claude Camélia with Tanner as co-producer; Jean Ristori engineered.
By 1985 Riley had largely shifted from solo organ to ensemble writing (the Cadenza on the Night Plain Kronos sessions had happened the year before), and No Man's Land sits in that transition: minimal modal piano figures over Bhatt's sustained sitar drone, with Riley's vocal lines drawn from the cantillation he had studied with Pandit Pran Nath. The film itself has aged into a minor classic of mid-eighties European cinema; the soundtrack, pressed in small numbers by the Swiss boutique Plainisphare, has remained obscure outside Riley specialist circles. The 1996 Plainisphare CD reissue added Conversation With the Sirocco, an additional Riley piece composed in the same period.
