Exklusive Videopremiere: Tindersticks feat. Robert Pattinson – „Willow“

„High Life“ (startet am 30. Mai) ist Claire Denis‘ erstes englischsprachiges Projekt. Für den Science-Fiction-Thriller arbeitete sie mit Robert Pattinson und Juliette Binoche zusammen.

Der Soundtrack zum Film stammt wie auch bereits bei sieben anderen Filmen der französischen Ausnahmeregisseurin von Stuart A. Staples von den Tindersticks (u.a. „Trouble Every Day“, „White Material“). Er erscheint am 05. April digital, am 12. April auf CD sowie am 03. Mai als limitiertes Vinyl.

Der am Donnerstag veröffentlichte neue Song „Willow“ ist in der letzten Szene des Films zu hören. Es ist ein echtes Tindersticks-Stück und wurde mit den Vocals von Schauspieler Robert Pattinson aufgenommen. Das Video zu „Willow“ zeigt einige Szenen aus „High Life“.

Stuart A. Staples zum neuen Projekt

„Most of the music for High Life was made before the filming. The conversation with Claire started maybe as far back as 2012. There were many ideas I wanted to explore and I appreciated the foresight of Claire and the producers in offering me support and encouragement to do this. As well as work with usual collaborators Dan McKinna, Neil Fraser and Earl Harvin, this afforded me purely experimental recording sessions with David Coulter, Thomas Bloch, David Okumu, Julian Siegel, Seb Rochford and the BBC singers. Several long sketches / pieces were created from these sessions that the eventual score was formed from or informed by.

I approached High Life with the simple idea of creating a sort of random music, existing in a void – like the constellations themselves – a framework that was always hidden from the musician and that they had only minimal or no information to play or react to as we recorded. The first piece completed was ‘The Yellow light’ for the early Claire Denis / Olafur Eliasson collaborative short film ‘Contact’ (2014). For this, each instrument / part was played into silence with arbitrary start points creating random movements and relationships when brought together. This theme / way of working runs through the entire making of the score for High life. Musicians generally worked ‘in the darkness’.

For ‘the void’ itself a series of hums and drones were created in the studio – various instruments played, or feeding back, or with their notes Sellotaped down, to make the studio space resonate in different keys. These stereo recordings were alive, working and changing within themselves – this approach was informed by my experiences creating the sound installation ‘Ypres’ at the In Flanders Fields WW1 museum in Belgium and the adventure of making this 12th century hall vibrate and resonate with its evolving orchestral score.

And then there was ‘Willow’. a seed of a song shared by myself and Dan Mckinna that eventually grew to be the conclusion of the High life with Robert Pattinson, the lead actor, singing the song in character to his daughter Willow, a theme that runs through the film.

For the flashback sequences on earth I spent many consecutive nights recording in the rain waiting for the right intensity of heavy drops falling from the guttering of my studio onto the carefully positioned paella pans below.

I felt the score should be intimate and hypnotic. Music made of hands and breath – acoustic instruments, electric guitars, fingertips.“