"Restraints" - soundtrack by Alexander Thomas

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaNM13gIPOw

I was asked by the producers of this very short film for the use of one of my recordings as the soundtrack. Have a watch.

To Alexander: Your looped soundtrack is beautiful. I can see why the filmmaker chose this track... it really supports the theme of the film.

Excellent!

I agree. Really good.

But...

I am hearing what sounds to me like a recording glitch at 5, 11, 16, 29, 34, 40, 58, 1:03 and 1:09 seconds into the playback. Was this intentional (in which case, hmm - not so keen on it) or an undesired artefact introduced by your looper or during the video editing process or just something peculiar to my computer?

Alexander, I'll go one further than Kevin and offer the following tactless praise: I like the music a lot, and I think it contributes more to the film than the images themselves. That is, when I watched the film with no sound, the images seemed incoherent... in particular, between the rapid-fire editing and the amateur acting, they seemed downright perfunctory, never developing any expressive depth.

Fortunately for the filmmaker, your music establishes both a sense of overall continuity (arguably normal practice for this sort of thing), and more importantly, an emotional connection. It transforms what might have come across as slapstick into something more affecting.

In fact, when I hear the music without the images, I don't miss the latter a bit.


Gordon, it's not your computer; I hear the same thing, in the same spots.

Thanks for the comments :) Listening back to the original recording I think it's down to something in the video editing process. Shrug!

I did actually write some new music for this soundtrack but they'd preferred to use something I'd already recorded. What I learned whilst writing stuff was that Bela Bartok's Mikrokosmos is the perfect reference point for writing sparse, sad piano music. I'm now convinced that if you studied it hard enough you'd discover an algorithm with which you could create a button that, when pressed, writes haunting piano scores until it breaks.