by now anyone who’s seen the trailer will be associating the music in it with something they heard before…

the music is a remixed version of a track from the score of the Darren Oronofsky film, “Requiem for a Dream”.  it’s a brilliant piece of music and has a high degree of tension!  it also happened to have been re-used by the LOTR:TTT marketing team for *that* film’s trailer a few years ago.  something common in film marketing (reusing familiar scores, etc) but in this case it’s generated either really positive or really negative postings from fans.  i think that’s part of the buzz strategy and clever, and don’t care because the film music will be different anyway…

the actual film music should be coming from UK electronic band Underworld, in collaboration with film composer John Murphy.  Most people will know Underworld through their track “Born Slippy”, used at the end of another Boyle movie, “Trainspotting”.  John Murphy can be heard in the music of “Snatch”, “28 Days Later” and a lot of other films…

i went and looked up my Underworld CDs and one interesting thing I found was that not much electronic music works to build real emotional tension in the extreme way that the requiem for a dream track did.  so maybe they’re holding back with the actual film music to get it *just* right?  or it’s just another choice ’secret’.  one important thing to note about Underworld is that because they have actual voice in their music, it becomes a lot more empathetic/human than most electronic music.

so what will the actual music sound like?  IMHO its going to be a key part of the film, serving as a way to increase tension and pace (the film itself is not that long…) i think it will also reflect the ambient environment of the Icarus II (big, but also constricting, mazelike) and the fact that most of the time not much happens on the ship (probably that way up until the beginning of the story in the film). btw, previous ’epic journey’ space films, like kubrick’s 2001 and scott’s ‘alien’ both had breakthrough music and sound design.

for a clue to how the new music will sound, its good to listen to some of the lesser known artists the SUNSHINE website team has been working with so far.  one contributor, david dipre has a nice myspace page (with music) and his sound is indeed spacey (i mean ‘big’), slightly glitchy and bass sound… sorry i’m not describing this well - check his page at the link below.  my favorite track is ‘large’…

david dipre
http://www.myspace.com/daviddipre

Underworld on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underworld_%28band%29

John Murphy on IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0614373/

i listen to a lot of electronic music and have to admit i’m still wondering about SUNSHINE music.  i looked for the tensest (sp?) artists/tracks I could think of but no single track jumped out saying “pretend i’m the SUNSHINE trailer music”… if you listen to the trailer, what fan suggestions do you have for a different track?  please post here, i’m curious

these were some of the artists’ music i was looking through
- Underworld
- FSOL
- Ministry, RevCo
- MBM
- Orbital, Aphex Twin, Autechre
- Bjork (more on the atmospheric side)
- Scores for ‘Solaris’ and ‘Last Life in the Universe’ (wow, the last one fits SUNSHINE well!)

although it can be really tense, i didn’t initially listen to hi-speed stuff like Squarepusher (’Tomlib’ from Lost in Translation is heartbreaking though), hard techno… it could work too (but i don’t have time).

anyway, as a big music and film (and Boyle and Underworld) aficionado, i’ve had fun putting this all down.  thanks for reading!