Broadcast - Berberian Sound Studio L.P.

BROADCAST - BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO LP / NEW VINYL / WARP 2012

"The Broadcast soundtrack to Peter Strickland's award-winning 'Berberian Sound Studio' has finally been given a release via Warp and credited to both James Cargill and the much missed Trish Keenan. Working closely with the film's supervising sound editor, Joakim Sundstrom, James Cargill started work on the material with Trish prior to her untimely passing in 2011, realising some of the uneasiest, phantasmagoric themes and atmospheres in their immaculate oeuvre. In so many ways it's the perfect vehicle for Broadcast to explore their nefarious influences and interests intersecting Italian horror films and the pioneering sonics of Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai. Working to a complex, inception-like meta-narrative revolving about a "British sound recordist's slowly degenerating mental state while working in an Italian film studio", they weave original foley and dialogue from its eccentric, sinister characters into 39 kaleidoscopic cues and themed fragments, patching eerie harpsichord waltzes next to lysergic organ vamps, spine-creeping Moog atmospheres, miasmic chorales and blood-curdling screams, all with a drifting, trans-dimensional quality and that dusty sort of articulation unique to Broadcast's anachronistic oeuvre. It plays like a library record, but there are flashes of classic Broadcast that shine through, from the "Work And Non Work" era romanticism of "The Equestrian Vortex" to the gorgeous skittering "The Sacred Marriage" - resulting in a record that not only fulfils it's brief, but which also offers a tantalising glimpse at what might have been."