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Baker's Dozen

Deep Space 13: Stephen Mallinder's Favourite Soundtracks
Sean Kitching , July 13th, 2022 09:30

Sean Kitching speaks to Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire and Wrangler about 13 of his favourite science fiction, horror and fantasty film soundtracks

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Wrangler – The Tourist OST

It started off as a BFI thing that we got asked to do with Mica. They paired us up together and said: ‘Do you want to choose a film that has never been made and try and make the film and score the soundtrack for the film live?’ The project was called ‘The Unfilmables’, to be done as a double hander, with us and Mica. We worked with the guy who does our visuals, Dan Conway, and so we created this film. Also Tash Tung, who we’ve done video work with before. We filmed some really quite complex scenes and the star of the film is Natalie Sharp, the Lone Taxidermist. Nat’s the main character in the film and a lot it is incredibly abstract. It’s about 40 minutes long. It’s an abstract interpretation of Clair Noto’s script, because that’s all there was. It went as far as HR Giger doing the set for it. But the film never got made, so we picked up the pieces. The story is kind of The Man Who Fell To Earth, but it’s kind of connected with sex clubs and aliens, alien intrusion and all this. It’s very noir, very New York based. Nat loved it because she got to fight an all-in wrestler. My part was narrating – very processed, some of it pre-recorded, some of it live. We used two projectors and played the soundtrack and did it all live. It was really mental but it is actually an album. It was just really fun and it was probably the one time that we were able to do a soundtrack with absolute liberty because we’d done the film and we were projecting the film. I’d love to perform it again.