The band Skurkarna (the crooks) call their music crime rock. On the new album “A Crimewave Escapade” they direct a hardboiled instrumental gangster story. The combination of the atmosphere from thriller movies and TV series from the sixties, samples with film quotes and their own touch of rock make it a quite interesting album, absolutely worth seeing.
Skurkarna on Facebook – on Spotify – on Wimp – on Bandcamp
Petter Lindhagen calls his instrumental one man band Tired Tape Machine. The name is taken from an album by Smog from 1990, as Petter thought that his first album “Somewhere Safe” sounded a little bit like a tired old tape recorder.
Recently he released the album “Between Raindrops”, a quite pleasant instrumental experience. It has a filmic vibe, and I easily play images in my mind as I listen. He dives in and out of different genres and mixes them, but without being difficult to access. No, this is very easy to absorb and sink into, with melodies and soft ambiences to lean back on. A diverse album but with a very personal touch.
You can listen to the album and follow Tired Tape Machine on Facebook. “Between Raindrops” is also available on Wimp.
Behind the artist name Morris i motljus we find Henrik Ivarsson. In the Autumn he released the EP “Morris i motljus”, seven instrumental songs, which directly transfered me to the movies. There are alternating bombastic rock orchestral works and softer, more ambient tracks, like it was made for an epic adventure on the big screen.
A couple of years ago Henrik read a newspaper article with the headline “Jag fruktade att de hade ätit Morris” (“I feared that they had eaten Morris”), a story about an old lady who was afraid that the fox had taken her cat. During summer 2010 he came up with the idea that he would compose music for the story, thereby also starting to realize his dream of creating music for film.
“Jag fruktade att de hade ätit Morris” was only a project name from the start, but soon after he had released the music on the net, it de facto became his artist name. As he never was comfortable with that name, he took the opportunity to change it before this release.
You can listen to and download the EP for free on his Bandcamp page and you can also find him on Facebook. Here’s the opening track “Drömmar är som vackrast innan de går i uppfyllelse” (“Dreams are most beautiful before they come true”:
People have created fantastic film music throughout the years. I think it’s strange that there’s so few collaborations between musicians/artists and movie creators. A director I spoke with the other day explained to me that he always set aside a rather large sum of money for the music of the movie. But when the movie project takes longer time than expected and other events, unaccounted for, need to be taken care of, this sum of money is used, and compromises have to be done.
I want to tell you about Hans Lundgren, 26 years old, whose music makes me shiver of well-being. Here he describes how he started making film music:
“For me the interest for film music started already at the age of 7 when I used to rush to the TV to be able to see the intro to “Dallas”. I loved the music and how it interacted with the moving pictures. But it wasn’t until I was 15 that I became aware of film music at a deeper level.
After playing and singing several years, I started study music on high school in Skellefteå, and it was there that I seriously started composing music inspired by movies. After that followed studies in composition on Skellefteå Music College, Framnäs Folkhögskola, Musikhögskolan i Piteå, film science at Luleå Tekniska Universitet, and now in Stockholm at KMH (Royal College of Music in Stockholm) and DI.
This is the first time that they have created a film music program on a higher level of education in Sweden. The education is divided more or less with half of the time at KMH and half of the time at DI. The theoretical parts at KMH and the practical parts at DI. And just like with all the other students at the movie department at DI, 4 students are admitted every two years. That is, 4 directors, 4 producers, 4 dubbing editors, 4 film editors, 4 screenwriters, 4 photographers, and now this year also 4 film composers.
As a first project at DI we were assigned to write music for four short films. Every team has their own movie that is supposed to work both as a story that stands for itself and also in a context together with the other three movies. All four films are spun around the same central event which binds the movies together, but from the different perspectives of four people and their unique experience of the situation. It has been a very interesting and fun process to be a part of. My first meeting with the short film I was to compose to, was at a spotting session where I, together with the director, the producer and the others, watched a raw cut of the film where we started discussing how, when and what function the music should have in the movie. When should the music start/end? What’s the emotional style? What’s the musical style, and so on?
After that, I watched the movie a couple of times, without starting to compose anything, just to absorb the movie. It was easier to get to the core of the story then. For this project I made a couple of different versions of the music, before we found something that felt right from an emotional and dramaturgical perspective. We have recently finished the project and made the final cut of the movie. That’s when the dialogue, the music and the effects are mixed together to create a good sound picture for the movie. The premiere will be in November.
Soon the recording of the next project starts, and I am looking forward to being part of telling a story in a musical and dramatic way that drags people into the story. Finally I would like to say that I really hope that this education will help to lift Swedish film music, and that people who want to write music for films can have a place to meet, develop and work together with the professional film makers of the future.”
Here’s a couple of tracks from Hans’ production:
Resan mot ljuset
Death Is Not the End
Do you want know more about Hans? Here is his site.
There you read that he has arranged and orchestrated “Sjökor och Stekare” for the Umeå Symphony Orchestra, that he has been played in P2 (Swedish national radio channel), and that TV4 has shown his short film “Att återvända” (“To come back”). Just the images on his site are worth a visit. Beautiful!
And of course you can listen to his music.
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