Atomic Big Bang - On the soundtrack album "Atomic" MOGWAI explore new ways of making music

2015 was a year of change for Mogwai. Original member John Cummings left the band surprisingly, but a new project was already on the way. Northern Irish director Mark Cousins hired the quartet to accompany his ambitious documentary "Atomic, Living In Dread And Promise" with music; a job the band didn't want to cancel despite Cummings' departure. "The album was also a test for the band," explains multi-instrumentalist and sound witch Barry Burns, "we didn't know how Mogwai would work without John. It's funny when a founding member leaves you, it has a direct effect on the musical collaboration. And we didn't have much time. The music was finally recorded in twelve days."

The director supplied the band with film snippets and talked a lot with the musicians about the mood he wanted to create in his film. A difficult way of working, as Burns reports: "It's always the case with soundtracks that as a musician you hardly get to see anything - and if you do, then only short excerpts - that's in the nature of things, after all, the film is also cut to the music. When we were working on the documentary 'Zidane', for example, we had hardly seen anything at all, but the director had precise ideas as to what mood our music should create. With 'Atomic' such close cooperation was a basic condition, since he has no dialogues, only a few interviews with scientists and so on. So the music is practically the entire soundtrack."

The documentary was commissioned by the BBC, which produced a series of television films on the seventieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Cousins mainly assembles old film and television images and thus creates a hybrid of documentary and art film...

Lesen Sie mehr im eclipsed Nr. 180 (Mai 2016).