Evening of Light posted a new review of “Edison’s Frankenstein”:
Frankenstein, made in 1910 by Edison studios, is one of the oldest horror movies, though not one of the better known ones. According to this feature, all but one of the film’s copies were lost, and it resurfaced as late as the 1970s. Silent movies are usually supplied with a score from some stock music archive, but Daniel Tuttle, the man behind Life Toward Twilight, apparently wasn’t content with the versions of this film’s score that were out there. So, he set to composing his own. The project took some years too attain final form, but in 2008, the release was there, combining the original film with new score, and including a CD with more extended versions of the soundtrack compositions.
As can be expected, the approach is from the direction of dark ambient and industrial electronics, not a bad choice, even for a movie from a different period. The soundtrack combines simple piano melodies, synthesizer waves, drones and some quite heavy noises and percussive sounds here and there. The combination of film and score works very well, in particular in the part in the first half of the movie where Frankenstein conducts his experiment. The impressive stop-motion animation of the monster’s alchemical birth in the cauldron is accompanied by intense industrial ambient, both elements enhancing each other and forming the highlight of this release. After this climax, the pace of the movie slacks a bit, depicting the haunting of Frankenstein’s bridal night and the subsquent ‘dissolution’ of the monster in a less impressive way than the parts that came before.
All the same, this short film is a pleasure to watch, especially for historic reasons. In addition, the soundtrack adds a lot to the movie’s atmosphere, not in the least because the alternative (stock piano music) could be considered particularly gruesome (cf. [YouTube]). If you’re interested in old (horror) movies and post-industrial music, Edison’s Frankenstein is excellent value for money. And if you’re not convinced, and want to try before you buy, the soundtrack can be downloaded for free from the artist’s webpage.
Mick Mercer posted a review of “Edison’s Frankenstein”.
A cute idea this, where music has been added as a modern score to the original film of Frankenstein, just as Jackson Del Ray did with Nosferatu. (It’s anyone’s guess who will get to The Hunchback Of Notre Dame first.) We’ll get to the film shortly, because that’s the dvd, but the CD has twelve tracks which are out of sequence, presumably for a reason.
‘Discovered The Mystery Of Life’ is weighty string-torn ambient, stormy and bundling dramatically across initially mellow intentions. ‘The Evil In Frankenstein’s Mind Creates A Monster’ shuffles about, a lumbering cacophony of slow moving sound. Both ‘Appalled At The Sight Of His Creation’ with its plain and simple agitation and the equally brief ‘The Return Home’, a gentle introspective stroll, are instruments only, then we’re back to more shuffling soundscape with ‘The Monster Sees Himself’, not that we hang about as almost at once the groaning piano of ‘Bridal Night’ moves into a clumping rhythmic dementia.
‘Overcame By Love And Disappears’ heaves out the downcast cello and some supportive keys, before ‘Attack’ shows it’s almost got the length to start working as an ill-tempered but effective rhythmic piece which stands alone, because most of these are too short. ‘The Monster’ is thumpety noise again, before the milder ‘The Mirror’ breaks midway to imply tearful pain. ‘Leaving For College’ is all whispery with train sounds, glowing in a ghostly fashion, and ‘Edison’s Frankenstein’ is sensible and moody strings and keys again with a few noises off, like dragging sacks of strangely heavy leaves, into heavier morose rumbling then takes you through it all.
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The original CD/DVD set with the handmade packaging for the “Edison’s Frankenstein” release is now sold out. This set will still be available in a standard edition with the plastic DVD case for a while, though it will still be a limited edition and only available for a brief time. If you’re interested in buying this, now is the time to do it. Go to the Bottle Imp Productions store to purchase the CD/DVD set.
The video can be watched on Youtube:
On Youtube (part1)
On Youtube (part2)
The music can be downloaded and purchased from the Bottle Imp Productions webpage.
Edison’s Frankenstein
If purchased, it comes with an audio disc with all the music, and a DVD of the film with the Life Toward Twilight score. The package is hand made, painfully I should add, by me. Photos of the packaging:
The other important item is that I have also decided to liberate the album “I Swear By All The Flowerrs”. You can now download the music in MP3 format, along with the cover art.
I Swear By All The Flowers”
Reviews for “I Swear By All The Flowers”
From Sepiachord:
“The CD is haunting, but never haunted. We’re not taken on some heavy-handed “creepy” journey. This isn’t the soundtrack for a horror film about undead tots in a contaminated nursery. It’s the sound of an old, decaying orphanage where the echoes of children and songs just want to be tucked in until the end of time.”
From Evening of Light:
“..it is as if these are visions and sounds picked up by the ghost of a deceased person, who still lingers somewhere between this world and the next… Even childhood memories and pictures of lost innocence drift through the consciousness of the musical protagonist. You can feel the yearning, madness, and grief, and that makes this a beautiful piece of music.”
So, on Myspace last week I made a post about a new album I have been working on. Here are some details regarding this album.
I started writing this material in early 2005, around the time I released “We Waited For A Subtle Dawn”. It was intended to be the follow-up to that album. Eventually, the idea was to put together a score for the “Frankenstein” by Edison Studios filmed in 1910.
For those unaware, Edison’s “Frankenstein” is one of the earliest known horror movies, as well as the first film version of Shelley’s “Frankenstein”. The movie was lost for many decades, until a private collector announced he had a copy of the reel in the 1970′s. Here is a really good article on the movie and its history.
Copies of this film are floating around Youtube, Archive.org, and elsewhere. I am not typically into the stock music editor’s choice for these old silent films, and this one in particular seemed particularly obnoxious. I decided to use this film as the basis for composition. At that time, I wasn’t sure whether or not I was going to try to sync the movie with the music or not.
I sat down and wrote a number of small tracks, mostly composed of simple melodies, with minimal percussion. I started lining up these tracks with the film, and after some personal frustrations that accompanied a lot of what I was doing at the time, scrapped the project. I took a few of the tracks, and started fleshing them out into finished pieces and putting them into a demo for an album that would be the follow-up album for “I Swear By All The Flowers” sometime in 2006. Sometime after that, I decided on a major change in direction and ended up composing and releasing, “I Swear By All The Flowers”, instead of any real follow-up to “We Waited For A Suble Dawn”.
Recently I was going through data backups and ran into this unfinished project, and decided to finish it up. I really like some of the tracks, and hate to see it sit abandoned on a CD-R and never finished. I have been working on it the past few weeks. Here are some details:
Tracklist
01. Discovered the Mystery of Life
02. The Evil In Frankenstein’s Mind Creates a Monster
03. Appalled at the Sight of His Creation
04. The Return Home
05. The Monster Sees Himself
06. Bridal Night
07. Overcome by Love and Disappears
08. Attack
09. The Monster
10. The Mirror
11. Leaving for College
12. Edison’s Frankenstein
Tracks 1 through 7 are the individual songs broken apart by changes. Track 8 is an extended version of the music from the attack scene. Tracks 9 through 11 are outtake tracks, which were originally used in the mixed, then replaced. Track 12 is the final mix as it appears synchronized with the film.
All of the melodies and musical parts were composed around March and April of 2005. Tracks 2 and 5, which involve important scenes with the Monster, are mostly ambient/noise pieces which I mostly composed over the last few weeks. Track 6 ends with an abrasive percussion sequence which was originally composed to go on the album, “Blood”, but was scrapped because I felt it detracted from the effect of that album. It ended up working here, so it was mixed into the score. Track 8 is the whole recording as it was to appear on “Blood”.
Track 9 is a newly assembled track that plays during the monster creation scene. It is buried in the mix with some older material. I liked how it turned out by itself, and wanted to put it on here by itself.
Tracks 10 and 11 were initially composed in 2005, but in 2006 assembled as full recordings and put on a demo. When putting together the final score, I decided they didn’t fit as well as I had liked, and left them off. I felt they should be included on this album.
Since this material in no way represents the future direction I am going with Life Toward Twilight, it is not going to be promoted very heavily. Still, I like the end result and want to share it. This really is the follow-up to “We Waited For A Subtle Dawn”, and people who enjoy that album will very likely enjoy this as well. I will be posting it as a free download in a few days, along with the film synced to the music on Google video. Youtube won’t let me upload a 12 minute video, but Google video will. I am also going to post it for sale as a CD/DVD for anyone that wants it in higher quality.
In other news, I did a major update the the Life Toward Twilight web page. See it here.
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