Track Three: Rain Race


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ROUND ONE: 12 3456789
ROUND TWO: 12 3 45678 9


  • Track 3, Rain Race, starts after a silence (cued by Wendy’s gesture toward the living room), then accompanies the pleasant part of the interview, ending once the subject of Tony reemerges. Wendy has Froot Loops behind her head this whole time, which has a nice echo to the looping nature of racing.
  • A few of the books have names that seem to echo the theme of racing, though none of them are explicitly about racing, to my knowledge: Flipsville, King Oil, China Flight. The one with the closest connection would probably be Tiger of the Snows, the autobiography of Tenzing Norgay, the first man (that we know of) to climb Mt. Everest. You could think of the desire to climb Everest as a kind of race, in the “space race” sense. Also, Angell, Pearl and Little God is about the sport of boxing.
  • In the mirrorform we’ve just heard the last of Dick’s cries of “Hello!” and we follow a murderous Jack stalking to the kill spot, and we see Wendy escaping the bathroom, Jack stalking through the kitchen, and Danny running to his hiding place. The track ends on this really delightfully sweet note as backward Danny is backward dashing to the steel cupboard.
  • I will say, for a track called “Rain Race” I would’ve thought we’d get one of the film’s many references to floods, but the closest thing, it seems, is just seconds into the track, as Jack passes what I call the lightningrug (because of all those little zig-zag shapes above the more sun-shaped pattern), and the red-and-black doors that resemble the bloodfall elevators. In this moment, the lightningrug overlays with Horse and Train, a kind of abstract racing image, which, again, was an album cover all its own.

Click here to continue on to Track Four: Tangerine Beach


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