"While Ari Aster was writing his folk horror Midsommar (2019), he listened to The Haxan Cloak's Excavation (2013) to set a mood for the story. This led him to commissioning Bobby Krlic (aka The Haxan Cloak) to score the film - the first of three Krlic has done for Aster so far. Depending on your view, Excavation is either rote or definitive industrial-drone-witch-noise, booming with cinematic tropes of spookiness, pounding with death knells and enraged percussion."
"Ever since runes were employed for Led Zeppelin's fourth untitled LP (1971), occultism in music has been fetishised in highly performative modes. Excavation plays like an imaginary soundtrack to a film that has been grown from the compost of 1970s flirtations with Crowley-esque sensations and Lovecraftian sonorities, tempered by digitally distorting plug-ins. Despite - or because of - its portentous aural world-building and psychoacoustic theatre of campy dread,"
"Midsommar follows US anthropology undergrads Christian and two fellow students who have been invited by a Swedish friend to witness the mid-summer festival in a remote village in northern Sweden. Christian asks his girlfriend Dani along: an inconsiderate act, as she is recovering from her bipolar sister having just died by suicide after murdering their parents. Dani's relationship with Christian is on the rocks, and none of the troupe realise they have all been lured as sacrifices for the village's death cult proceedings."
Ari Aster listened to The Haxan Cloak's Excavation while writing Midsommar and subsequently commissioned Bobby Krlic to score the film. Excavation employs industrial-drone textures, occult-flavored sonorities, booming cinematic tropes, death knells and enraged percussion. Occultism in music has been fetishised since runic imagery on Led Zeppelin's untitled LP, and Excavation channels 1970s Crowley-esque and Lovecraftian influences tempered by digital distortion. The record functions like an imaginary soundtrack and participates in an ecological loop where cine-inspired "temp" music feeds into formal film scoring, especially within horror. Midsommar centres Dani's grief and culminates in the protagonists being lured as cult sacrifices.
Read at The Wire Magazine - Adventures In Modern Music
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