6.
Bruce Langhorne – The Hired Hand OST
This is a more recent love of mine. I really like the treatments of tape delays on the traditional instrumentation and the space created by the music. I’ve always been more a fan of traditional American blues and folk, rather than any British stuff. I really can’t cope with most UK folk music. When I heard this soundtrack originally, I was in a Music Exchange, and I thought it was just amazing. I’d seen the end of The Hired Hand years ago in the daytime on TV, and I remember just catching the end of it and being really intrigued. I enjoyed the soundtrack, and I think at the time, I’d been doing a lot of Imbogodom [Alexander’s experimental side-project with Daniel Beban] recordings, and on the soundtrack [Langhorn] is using tape loops to create delays, as well as banjos, guitars and other traditional instruments to get this sort of lonesome Western-type sound. There’s barely any music really, just these gorgeous sounds, like wind and other atmospherics. There are some really beautiful compositions and I just really like the soundtrack. It was released on Blast First and I don’t think the original tapes exist to The Hired Hand so they had to take the recording off of the actual soundtrack on the celluloid, and there’s something that I really like about that; the fact that it hasn’t been digitally re-mastered, mixed and made “super-bling” in a way. It just exists because of the actual film itself.
