Soundtracks

The band have occasionally created soundtrack work, to their own films and those by others. Only two have been broadcast to date.

W.S.H
Short for Weird Shit Happens, this film was broadcast as part of the BBC’s Weird Night on 18th December 1994.

“A folklorist researching an ‘urban legend’ becomes caught up in his task. The film tells its fictional story in documentary style, featuring interviews with real folklore scholars.”

The soundtrack is by FSOL, and largely consists of environments and unreleased material from the 3D Headspace Tour. It’s an unusual setting for material that we’re no doubt overly familiar with, but a fairly effective soundtrack to a disorienting and strange film. There was talk of the soundtrack being released in The Pod Room, although nothing has ever come of this.

Some of the film’s footage would later be used by the band for their Far-out Son of Lung VHS release, and a sample from the film can be heard in ‘In Solitude We Are Least Alone‘s closing environment.

Teachings from the Electronic Brain

“An electronic soup – culture is minced through the machines here at the brain producing a non-linear TV programme – chunky ingrediants include spoken word – comedy – music – poetry – information and philosophical shorts presented by amorphous changing entity Yage and film – animation – CG – first airing MTV Europe mid July”.

Sadly never given a proper release, this film was broadcast on MTV2 in October 1996 to promote the forthcoming release of Dead Cities. It’s the closest thing to the Yage film the band spent the 1990s promising, although it actually contains relatively little in the way of truly new visual material.

The film combines and reuses most of the footage from the Cascade, Lifeforms, The Far-out Son of Lung and My Kingdom with some new imagery: ‘Max’ includes beautiful colourful abstraction and 3D graphics, including some new fully rendered landscapes that always remind me of the ‘Floating Islands’ level in Tomb Raider II; ‘We Have Explosive’ features entirely new collage graphics by Run Wrake; ‘Glass’ seems to have taken a large portion of the budget, with a whole new range of CG structures, landscapes and animated objects, creating a strange alternate world for the track to occupy; ‘Mountain Goat’ features timelapse footage of London.

After a largely Dead Cities oriented run, the film closes on a handful of older tracks. The initial MTV broadcast gave titles for each piece, introducing the between track sections all as ‘Environment’ by Amorphous Androgynous. A promo VHS copy of the film was sold on eBay in the early ’00s, and I was poised to bid on it until it suddenly shot up to more than £200 in the last five minutes. Sigh.

Tracklist
Part 1
1. Everyone in the World is Doing Something Without Me
2. Yage (Oil Mix)
3. Max
4. Accompaniment for Melodious Expression environment
5. We Have Explosive
Part 2
1. Unknown environment
2. My Kingdom
3. Quagmire
4. Dead Cities environment
5. Glass
Part 3
1. Unknown environment
2. Oil – Slight of Hand
3. Unknown environment
4. Mountain Goat
5. Unknown environment
6. Slider
7. FSOL/Dead Can Dance Sound Samples