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.

Have you ever walked home through a city at four in the morning? Walking a couple miles along roads and concrete normally fraught with activity can be a surprisingly quiet experience. You encounter bright street lamps, electric signs with circuit quirks, the occasional trash-rummaging animal and a few cars driven by what seem like zombies, but mostly it’s just you and yourself.An Eclipse sounds like one of these late night walks, and Life Toward Twilight, as a name, is ever so appropriate for Daniel Tuttle’s music.

An Eclipse, a 3″ CD on the Bottle Imp label, is the fourth official release from Life Toward Twilight. Tuttle made 25 copies of this work in 2003 to give away, but this is the first time it’s ever been available to a wider audience. The album is divided into two movements, and lasts just the right amount of time for you to say “no” to a taxi and take a jaunt through the concrete jungle. It begins with a slow-pulsing drone of grey clouds, evoking that feeling of pause one gets when stopped near a solitary street lamp, while exploring a sleeping city. Nocturnal whirs and swaths of bowed metal join a distant melange of singing bowls as the dominant ‘Om’ drone weaves subterranean tones at a lugubrious pace. The ominous nature of some of these sounds are kept at arm’s length and don’t sound either bright or overly dark. It’s dark, but not freak-out-dark, like if you can imagine how an abandoned building won’t hurt you but can keep your exploration modest.

The second movement is a collaboration between Tuttle, synth/noise player Brent Nicholas, and female vocalist Elyse Reardon. Here, sonic weather enters the fray, as mechanical tones and damaged winds force their way through your headphones, often blowing them out entirely. Slowly we hear Reardon’s haunting, headless vocals drift out of the storm clouds, casting a shadowy mood that invokes decaying beauty. If I were engaged in a terrifying interactive video game environment, fearfully turning corners where aliens could be waiting to pounce, this music would really fit. On its own, An Eclipse is honestly not all that gripping, as I feel its attempt at spookiness is too ambitious for the sounds themselves. Its timbre and minimalist quality is very similar to some of Richie Hawtin’s beat-less Plastikman work, which always puts me on pause and makes me feel like a meat puppet on drugs.

The album closes with a bit of a twisted “epilogue”. A cello or other stringed instrument is bent and colored sepia on a crackly turntable, sounding much like the bygone-era sound collages of Eric Cordier, while a hushed male voice recites a brief poem. It’s a nice, aural pastiche, as if we are privy to a final scene when the speaker was alone in his apartment hours after a cosmic event, writing these sparse words to a loved one, or himself, or no one.

An Eclipse’s dark, ambient bath of sound is a decent, pocket-sized piece of Life Toward Twilight’s work, but it isn’t long enough to really engage in Daniel Tuttle’s world. The tracks are missing a bit of the depth that gives similar artists (i.e. Aidan Baker, Maeror Tri etc.) an edge and a listener’s longevity, but for someone wanting a gateway drug to the world of dark ambient music, you might take a crack at a disc like this.