Steven Severin: Well, there's a fairly limited supply to start with. What are your criteria for selecting films to soundtrack? It is the third in Severin's Music For Silents project, following an initial outing that featured Germaine Dulac's 30-minute classic The Seashell And The Clergyman (1928) alongside a selection of contemporary silent shorts, and a tour soundtracking Jean Cocteau's The Blood Of A Poet (1932). Vampyr was actually Dreyer's first sound film, though it retains the aesthetic of a silent picture and uses dialogue sparingly. Severin is now about to embark on the second leg of a UK tour performing a bespoke electronic soundtrack for Carl Dreyer's 1932 surrealist horror Vampyr, the Danish director's follow-up to his masterpiece The Passion Of Joan Of Arc. The following year he and Arban scored Paul Burrows' psychological thriller Nature Morte, going on to work with director Matthew Mishory on his acclaimed short Delphinium: A Childhood Portrait Of Derek Jarman (2009) and the forthcoming feature Joshua Tree, 1951: A Portrait Of James Dean. He worked with Shakti again on Beauty And The Beast, a 2005 collaboration with his wife Arban and the first release on their Subconscious Music record label. So it's not surprising that Severin has continued to pursue this direction since the Banshees broke up in 1996, beginning with 1998's Visions album, a reworked and extended version of his soundtrack to Nigel Wingrove's controversial short film Visions Of Ecstasy.įollowing that with the Maldoror album, which began life as a musical commission for Brazilian theatre company Os Saturos' production of the Comte de Lautréamont's poetic novel Les Chants de Maldoror, Severin was then asked to provide music for The Woman In The Dunes, a stage production by the dancer Shakti. The band's later albums took on an increasingly cinematic sweep, and they scored a 1992 hit with the single ‘Face To Face', taken from the soundtrack to Tim Burton's Batman Returns. The early Banshees records too contained myriad references to film, their name derived from the 1970 Vincent Price chiller Cry Of The Banshee. So it's something I've wanted to do for a very long time."Īlthough birthed from the very heart of London's punk scene, the Banshees' musical background took in soul, psychedelia and, perhaps most importantly, the art-glam of David Bowie, Roxy Music and The Velvet Underground: acts that placed an equal emphasis on visual presentation and made explicit reference to the artistic, theatrical and cinematic avant-garde. If they've done it, surely it deserves to get something better? And obviously all of Kenneth Anger's movies have specially commissioned music anyway, that fits perfectly, so why would you bother changing that? And then I saw Philip Glass do Cocteau's Beauty And The Beast live, and a pretty rare performance of Todd Browning's The Unknown with music by John Cale, which was pretty staggering. And I don't know what went on but at least one of them had a soundtrack by ELO. One of the things that spurred me on was in the late '70s there were screenings of Kenneth Anger's Magick Lantern Cycle, at the old Scala. I never saw the film - I still haven't seen the film - but it was only their third album and I thought, Wow, that's what I'd love to do! Be in a band and be in a band that did soundtracks. "I remember seeing the cover of the Pink Floyd album More.
Best known as the bassist and equal creative partner in Siouxsie And The Banshees, Severin has spent the last decade or so focusing on soundtrack work for film and theatre. "It's always played a large part in what I do," says Steven Severin on the phone from his home in Edinburgh.
0 kommentar(er)
