“He went back to the music that Hollis and Air had created for Peacock, and discovered that it worked well with the feel of the second season of “Boss”. Like Cillian Murphy’s character, Kelsey Grammer’s Chicago mayor Tom Kane is dealing with a mental disorder that he must keep hidden.
Reitzell said that “ARB Section 1” is only part of the music that Hollis created for Peacock; he hopes to use the rest at some point.”
Jenn Pelly for Pitchfork, August, 2012
The sub-heading for that Pitchfork article is “First new music from the elusive genius in 14 years”. It’s a decent sized write-up for a piece of music that is barely a minute and a half long. By Mark Hollis’s own standard, you can’t boil an egg to it. You can’t boil an egg to New Grass, either. Think about that. But ARB Section 1 isn’t ridiculously brief due to any Hollis contrariness. It’s just that it is a tiny taste of something bigger.
People – well, Hollis fans anyway – LOST THEIR MINDS when this first appeared in the world. Reading old interviews with the fascinating Brian Reitzell is a reminder that fans were missing Mark Hollis long before 2019.
Brian and Mark became friends in the 2000’s, the sort of friends who could talk together for hours about books, movies and (sometimes) music. Sounds magical doesn’t it. Maybe it was, a bit, ‘cause that friendship created a movie score. It never made it to the screen. Not because it wasn’t good enough for the movie. I like to believe it was because it was too good for the movie. I mean, Cillian Murphy fans aside, have you ever seen or even heard of Peacock?
Despite that last sentence from Pitchfork, I doubt ‘the rest of it’ will ever see the light of day (now).
ARB Section 1 is a sliver of music written to be both heard and watched. I haven’t seen it, only heard it – it’s hard to judge from half of the intended experience.
I have however read that ARB Section 1 was played over a scene where the character is in a confused psychological state, and apparently the music perfectly expressed that vibe. It doesn’t have lyrics but if it did have maybe they would go something like this:
’Breathe on me, eclipse my mind. It’s in some kind of disarray.’
ARB Section 1 https://youtu.be/pHIgRNFuYsk?si=DVYQoeLu8f7haOiT