British electronic producer and musician Kevin Richard Martin (The Bug, King Midas Sound) has released a new album called Return to Solaris which is out now via Panthom Limb. It is a rescore of Andrei Tarkovsky’s seminal 1972 movie Solaris. Listen below and read our interview here.
According to the press release, Back in May 2020, Kevin Martin (now based in Belgium) was invited by the Vooruit Arts Centre in the city of Ghent to compose a new score for a film of his choice. Having been long inspired by pioneering Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, Martin tells us that his 1972 masterpiece Solaris was the “natural choice”.
The results – an all-new score entitled Return to Solaris – are breathtaking. The film is intense, psychologically devastating and bleakly compelling. Interweaving themes of love, horror, sorrow, nostalgia, memory and dystopia, Martin’s score expertly mirrors this expansive breadth of psychic weight, from existential dread to heartbreaking poignancy, with immense emotional gravity. Drawn to its “narrative struggle between organic, pastoral memories of a lost past, and the harsh, dystopian realities of a futuristic hell,” Martin employs atonal noise, simmering waves of distorted synthesis, undulating drones and otherworldly, astronomic sound-design to crushing effect. Subtly submerged recurring motifs – reflections of individual characters – rise and fall amidst the fog, occasionally illuminating the doom like motes of starlight, before settling back into the density of space.