WITH her seductively dark beckon to the dark sides of a dankly merrie old country in cahoots with NYX, Deep England, now out and wreathing like evening mist around the collective consciousness, you may well be forgiven for thinking Elizabeth Bernholz, aka Gazelle Twin, could rest easy, her work here done at least for the moment; but not a bit of it, oh no.
She’s just dropped a brand new track, “The Well”,- it’s taken from the soundtrack from the forthcoming dark British tale of nightshifts in a crumbling hospital during the Winter of Discontent, The Power. That soundtrack will be out digitally on April 8th via Geoff Barrow’s kitemark of quality, Invada; yes, there will be vinyl, to follow.
The soundtrack is transmuted from base sources in collaboration with soundtrack composer Max de Wardener – apart from this one track, which arrived dark and ready in Elizabeth’s consciousness and demanded inclusion.
Tread carefully and you can see why: she voices a soul long passed in the dark welcome of a well, her voice in spectral choral symphony dragging you closer into her weed-graced dance. Her eerily sibilant lead vocal comes chained in synths so barely restrained in their cold evocation as to be worthy of that classic of eerie television plays, The Stone Tape.
Talking about the soundtrack, she says: “Working on The Power with Corinna [Faith, the film’s director] and Max didn’t feel much like work.
“It was a long-haul thrill, from our field trip to the derelict wing of Goodmayes Hospital to record squeaky trolleys and smashed pill bottles, to making countless experiments with samples, voice, and electronics, pushing them in every extreme direction we could think of. The results bring me a lot of joy. I hope the collaboration continues.”
Max adds: “For this score we tried to match Corinna’s terrifying vision of the dark by creating music that was both as ambiguous as it was frightening. Keeping the palette small to increase the feeling of claustrophobia, this ranged from quiet, dusty, out-of-focus sounds, to full-blown, dense vocal textures with pounding synths to evoke our primal fear of the unknown.
“Gazelle Twin’s brilliantly inventive approach to vocal music became such an important part of the film and it was a treat to work alongside her to make the score come to life.”.
Summoning the spirit of classic ghost stories such as Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and the intense psychological atmosphere of Dario Argento’s Suspiria, The Power, written and directed by BAFTA-nominated British film-maker Corinna Faith, will be available exclusively to stream on Shudder from April 8th.
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