Last Ride Soundtrack in stores August 10
Glendyn Ivin
When I was fifteen years old I found a discarded cassette tape on a train station bench.
It was black and scratched, like it had been stepped on, and all there was to identify it, was a hand scrawled ‘SPK’ on the label. At home I slipped the tape into my walkman and my head was filled with the rhythmic buzzing and electric screams of nightmares. I liked it. It took me some place else, even though I had no idea where that place was.
The moment after seeing the film Candy I walked into a record store and bought the soundtrack. I love that film and how the soundtrack played an essential role in telling the story of those desperate souls coming together and then apart again. The music took me to another place, but this time I felt I had been there before.
Some of the first ideas I had for Last Ride were music. For years I collected tracks and made compilations to inspire or possibly use in the film. I had planned to use pieces of music, rather than have music composed. I really resisted it. But towards the end of editing the film, I realised the film wanted and needed an original soundtrack.
Paul Charlier composed the music for Candy and was the only person I had a strong desire to work with. When he sent me his bio and music reel I was surprised to see in his dark past he was in a band called SPK! There was more than one reason why I had been drawn to work with Paul.
From the time Paul saw a cut of the film, to where we were sitting in the mix, was just over four weeks. This is an amazing feat from any musician considering the sheer amount of work that is required. Especially, as Paul and I had never met and therefore, we hadn’t had all those thousands of conversations that you usually have with regular collaborators, in order to develop our own language and atheistic.
I encouraged Paul to find ways of making the music sound ‘broken’ and incomplete, to leave the hum of guitar amps and organic imperfections that come with the writing and recording process. The work then was to find perfection in the imperfection.
Paul’s music brought a new and different life to the film. The music is like the film’s breath, or the blood pumping through it’s heart, or the sound of that heart breaking. The sound of all those things that you don’t know what they sound like until you hear them. A huge thanks Paul.