You’d think since i was doing a weird west cabaret i’d be listening to lots of old timey music and such (and to be fair i played the Hell On Wheels soundtrack non stop on my car for a week) but lately i’m in a really synthy mood. The soundtrack to Stranger Things (it’s so awesome), SVIIB’s School Of Seven Bells, Blond Redhead’s 23 and most of all, 65daysofstatic, in particular their Silent Running soundtrack.
65daysofstatic are a band from Sheffield who get classified as post-rock, a genre i lluuuuUUUURv, so i had checked them out based on that classification. However they are not really post rock as such. They are… an evolution into post rock, post math rock, electronica and glitch. Anyway i adore them. They’re first album The Fall Of Math is a great place to start. However, that album is not why we’re here today. I want to talk about the one that’s playing in my car stereo every other day: their soundtrack to Silent Running.
Silent Running is a 1972 sci fi film about a space ship containing the last remnants of plant life from Earth and the botonist who fights to keep it safe. I saw it years ago when from the ages of 19 to 22 i worked at a video store. It’s a… boring movie. Nice retro early 70s sci fi look. It was directed by Douglas Trumbull, who had previously worked as a special effects supervisor on 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Andromeda Strain. It’s kind of dull though.
Well, in 2011 the Galsgow Film Festival commissioned 65daysofstatic to rescore the movie and perform it live to a screening of the old sci fi classic. They did and afterwards ran an Indiegogo campaign to fund a studio recording.
It is this recording that is currently my album darling of the moment. Here is a track from the actual album which you can check out more of here, followed by some samples of the actual live rescoring (although audio quality is not nearly as fine as the album. I would love to watch a DVD of the album/movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL-8gntEoFY&index=3&list=PLwC7sQFnFUrBv5zxYpfpKJUyqNXdLf_6t
