The electronic musician has reshaped the film score, taken what was, and would always be, accompaniment—“mood music,” and brought it to the forefront and made it something that very well stands on its own legs. I mean, sure, yes, plenty of traditional orchestral film scores are great and successful, but you’re not going around listening to John fucking Williams on Spotify like he’s got the “hot, new track.” His stuff works alongside an exciting visual, and even that’s pretty goddamn tiresome, wouldn’t you agree? And then you have something like Machine Learning Experiments, a new original soundtrack from Augustus Muller (one half of Boy Harsher). It’s dynamic and danceable and emotive and it totally does not require the images onscreen for any sort of context or sentiment. It’s its own entity. The OST actually consists of two scores, for two separate films entitled, Orgone Theory, and Hydra, both from UK-based production company Four Chambers, who describes themselves as “deliberately ambiguous, rejecting labels for both films and performers, existing between genres of both art and pornography and dismissing the need for a definition of either.”
The first half, the tracks for Orgone Theory, serves as minimalist techno, noise soundscape and suspense score, ebbing and flowing in a way that seamless creates something entirely its own. The creeping synthesizer highs, emerging out of the dense fog, on the “Intro,” create an air of ominous invitation, one that hypnotizes as much as it warns, watch yr step. The veil is [mostly] lifted as Muller breaks into to glorious phasing and a most moveable staccato synth “Four on the Floor.” Percussion grows in intensity until it’s an irresistible, until it’s a full-on dance track. Simplistic yet wholly consuming, the beat courses through body and mind and memory and the waking world is thrown out the door, long forgotten—thank whatever goodness to which you pray. Garbled, ghostly cries ring out in the distance, as though to remind us of its dangers, but we stifle them with motion. The all-rhythm gives way to melancholic synthesizer. The soundtrack reminds you cannot have the good without the bad. It’s called conflict, friend. A slowed, steadied pulse is introduced amid internal grumbling and growling emanates from our own stomachs or hearts or hell. Things pick up again with warped, detuned, yet wholly infectious “Taste of Metal.” It’s laden with foreboding, but any resonant peril eating away at us, destroying us, is easily ignored as we move in the night.
Tracks 6-10 constitute the backing for the second film, Hydra, with an immediate shift away from the beat-driven, and towards the wondrous, on “Arrival.” Muller carries over a sense of the unknown, the dull throb-and-tick of “Invasion” like running towards a dusk-soaked wood and not looking back but knowing something is on your heels. Quiet is an instrument on this side of the record, the subtle allowance of room for thought being its own creator of mood. It’s like dangling a foot off the side of our bed—it’s probably fine, but, what if? Pulsation returns, undead, undying, on “Consumption.” There are visuals attached to these sounds, but they’re able to offer their own narrative not reliant on anything or anyone else. Everything exists without. By album’s end, you’ve sat with illicit dance, unnerving noise, and beauteous ambience…Can orchestra give that to film? Shut up, John Williams.
Machine Learning Experiments (Original Soundtrack) is out now via Nude Club.