Soundtracking the future Berliner and hardcore-industrial pioneer Alec Empire (Atari Teenage Riot) shares his thoughts on scoring the not-so-faraway German dystopia of Tarek Ehlail’s politically charged sci-fi film Volt.
“Tarek finished the film in October 2015, and it was while he was editing the movie that the refugee crisis was really blowing up, and society was starting to sink deeper into this reactionary nightmare. He contacted me a few months later and told me he needed a soundtrack ready in six weeks for the Munich International Film Festival. It fit perfectly because at the time, I was thinking a lot about something to say on the topic. The creative scene has been largely quiet. There’s so much tension, and a lot of bullshit is being repeated online over and over again. It’s all adding fuel to a fire we don’t need.
I was influenced by John Carpenter soundtracks like Halloween. It really showed how electronic music could be used to great effect in films. I wanted to illustrate the clash of the film’s two conflicting worlds – the police state and the anarchical refugee transit zone. So I thought, let’s take some cold Berlin techno and combine it with the darkness of Wagner; that’s the sound of the police! For the scenes in the refugee zone, I was inspired by early 1970s jazz, when Miles Davis and all those others started playing around with synthesizers – even though the soundtrack doesn’t really sound like jazz.
I don’t know whether Volt can still be called science fiction. Maybe we live in a time where showing a new gadget is not even important for sci-fi anymore. It’s much more interesting to ask what happens if we move further into a certain direction. We’re already hearing certain people talk about opening transit zones!”
Alec Empire’s original soundtrack to Volt (in theatres Feb 2) will be released on Feb 3 via Dependent Records.
