A Closer Listen

A Winged Victory for the Sullen’s third studio album, Iris, wilts in the winter and blossoms once again in the ripening of spring. With surprising additions and slightly harsher elements, Iris is a sub-zero score, and while it may be cold outside, the breaking of the sun can still lead to a beautifully crisp, bright day. Musically, the record is less a natural development and more a slight departure. While 2014’s sophomore Atomos inflated their modern classical-slash-ambient sound, their score for Jalil Lespert’s film expands it even more.

Instead of being constricted by the sharp and precise imagery of film, the score to Iris retains their refined, spacious atmosphere while being possessed by an altogether much darker soul. It can complement the image on the screen, but it’s also capable of extracting itself away from it, away from the reel; capable of having its own life away from the screen. It’s a sign of progress and of increasing maturity – not so much for the musicians, because they both already have that aplenty, but for the project as a whole. Iris is both older and wiser, it seems.

It’s less of a subtle change and more of an instantly apparent one, taking the duo of Adam Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran into new areas of sound. For a start, the orchestration feels deeper, and while a 40-piece string orchestra was used to record the score, something else is contributing to the atmosphere. The minimal piano has, in the past, been a well-defined and articulate aspect of their sound, every note a glistening stepping stone against a spectacular backdrop of an ambient waterfall, some icy drones and a set of solemn strings, but now it’s only an afterimage, glowing like something under the water. The grounded electronics keep the piano from appearing in a prominent way, but it remains to be seen if this is a new style or just a temporary outfit. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that both of them made sacrifices and changes for what the film demanded, and that’s the way to go.

As if to highlight this drift, the skeletal, fragile-as-glass melodies of their debut are no longer around. It may be a case of been there, done that, but in the process a part of their musical character disappears. Instead, Iris sleepwalks into a void of power bristling with static electricity. The red-blooded electronics are not just passers-by but inhabitants; they stagger and strafe, pirouetting in an unstable ballet drunk on midnight wine. The tender string swells are delicate, and the purring electronics sit beside them, threatening to bare their teeth in a menacing growl but never becoming abrasive or aggressive. As a quietly stirring breeze can lead to a volatile tempest, so too do the strings rise up in power and in might, constructing proud statues to reputable kings of long ago.

As expected, Iris is cinematic in its scope and in its quality. It was never going to be a let-down, but neither is it more of the same; progress is a brave thing. Light and airy electronics have always been there, but they were faint smudges, flickering in and around the atmosphere like a playful tail, whereas now they’re sharper and more pronounced. The synths strobe and pulse, making repeated incisions with sharp silver daggers. Sodium-washed streetlights stutter in the blaze of a too-bright light, in time with rhythmic footsteps, but the music is still recognizable. This is an urban sound, complete with darker streets home to shadows sketched in black; where near-empty roads are lit by dazzling headlights and sleeping trains slumber in their sidings. The city is quiet and fog-soaked as the music takes on the nocturnal, sleepy glow of a night drive.

Their music is in the constant process of ageing and is therefore a natural thing; it’s supposed to be this way. The seeping strings are a shade darker; grey hairs are creeping in. Sadness is clasped in a locket, and the heart cannot let it go. The dignity of the music is still there, but some of the harmonies have fallen away, rusting in a dying, dull gold, a rainbow with only one color. Still, it has the ability to occasionally shine and gleam, like a hopeful smile in the midst of a cold spell, and “Flashback Antoine” does exactly that. The air of a cool summit sweeps over the sound as the strings slowly play a haunting progression, and the piano resurfaces on “Galerie”, aiding sedation and filling the air with an amber glow. Iris can sometimes be a cold and moody listen, but it wants to believe in something better, and there’s still warmth in its heart. By the end, on “Comme on a Dit”, the dark mood has softened. The light is allowed to enter, melting the atmosphere like a January covering of black ice. (James Catchpole)

Release Date: January 13

Available here

The Quietus

It seems only logical that the duo of Adam Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran should tackle a movie score. If nothing else, it’s been Dustin O’Halloran’s bread and butter for a good few years now, with the pianist even making the transition to TV to give Transparent its perfectly nostalgic theme song. Wiltzie too has soundtracked a smattering of indie flicks and docs, and considering the duo’s second album was a score composed for a Wayne McGregor directed dance performance, the duo making a film soundtrack together was only a matter of time. So the frigidity of the flawed Iris score is most likely down to one of two things - the less-than-compelling assignment of soundtracking a run-of-the-mill French thriller, or the actual choice to release the thing as a de facto third Winged Victory album.

The film itself is a mish mash of pre-existing material. The Hitchcockian plot is a remake of Chaos, a relatively obscure Japanese thriller by Ringu director Hideo Nakata. The sheened finish, Ikea showroom sets, and uncannily attractive and impeccably tailored cast are all presented in faded shades of teal and grey, owing more than a little to countless millennial noir outings in TV and Film. The likes of Sky Atlantic’s The Last Panthers series starring Samantha Morton, John Hurt, and Tahar Rahim spring to mind - although that show saw Warp Records’ Chris Clark use the assignment as a springboard for a psychedelic variety of moods and instrumentation (not to mention the theme of the series was Bowie’s Blackstar). Perhaps the longer running time of a TV series simply provides a larger canvas for trial-and-error.

Recorded in Budapest with a 40-piece string orchestra in tow, the Iris soundtrack feels far too paint-by-numbers, gathering yearning strings to ebb and flow atop xeroxed prairies of arpeggiating synths. It’s muzak for gritty thrillers, maintaining a thin soup of emotion with enough colour to paint the background without muddying the foreground. In that respect, this music is to be fair, most likely doing its job. I’ve not taken the time to sit through the film for this review (firstly, this is an album not a film review, and secondly I can see it’s just not for me, somebody who’d rather watch Stroszek spiral downward towards suicide for the umpteenth time than watch sexy rich Parisians scheme, collude, and copulate), but one can imagine this working supremely well in context. It’s why the likes of Jóhann Jóhannsson get more full movie score commissions than your average actor gets roles - this ability to convey mood without taking over the screen. Perhaps resultantly though, it does not therefore make listening to even Jóhannsson’s scores for Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners or James Marsh’s The Theory Of Everything entirely fulfilling experiences unto themselves.

All that having been said, there are a few moments in the Iris score worth taking in. ‘Le retour en forêt’ for one is an especially well executed action sequence riding synth rhythms, while ‘L’embauche’ has some compellingly dreamy wafts of keyboard textures adding a mighty heft to the track akin to Wiltzie’s legendary other ambient band, Stars Of The Lid.

The for-the-most part absence of Dustin O’Halloran’s piano is thoroughly missed. It anchored both Winged Victory’s eponymous debut and Atomos, but is only really present here on closing track ‘Comme on a dit’ and ‘Galerie’, the latter of which is incidentally the highlight from the entire score, recalling the snowdrifts of unabashed emotion on early (meaning ‘good’) Sigur Rós, and with only distant hints of that vast string section. The score then returns to indiscernible lashings of emotive string notes as the tracks bleed into each other blandly, one expecting Bill Pullman to pipe up and implore us all to celebrate our independence day.

It’s difficult to be too critical though, as the album method of delivery is not at all what this music was meant for. It was designed as a sonic bed (for what admittedly sounds like a pretty run-of-the mill French thriller), a function at which it may well massively excel. It’s just a disappointment to see A Winged Victory For The Sullen churn out something quite so drab, especially considering the album for Atomos also worked so amazingly out of the context of the dance performance it was originally written for. If nothing else it just had more memorable motifs, more variety of sounds, and to be blunt, more heart. Perhaps also worth considering, the duo probably made more money off this score than the two previous albums combined and then some - if I were them however, I wouldn’t have necessarily made it ‘canon’.

Share this article:

Drowned In Sound 80

With this in mind, it is a huge pleasure to announce that none of these problems plague Iris. In fact, one of the best tributes that could be accorded to A Winged Victory for the Sullen’s third album is that you wouldn’t necessarily know that it even was a soundtrack if you came to it cold. A Winged Victory for the Sullen continue doing exactly what they’ve done so well over the course of their previous two albums: create ambient music that is both atmospheric and engaging simultaneously. However, whilst recognisably of a piece with their previous work, working with the demands of director Jalil Lespert has clearly forced the two musicians out of their comfort zones and Iris therefore represents an exciting evolution of the pair’s sound.

This sonic evolution hits you with full force in the second track ‘Retour au Champs de Mars’: a pulsing synth is faster and more full of urgency than anything that AWVFTS have put to record previously. Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran were presented with 'a script filled with tension, sexuality and darkness' which has clearly informed the more urgent sounds and feeling of momentum in Iris. Hanging over and above the action, however, the beautifully textured washes of sound that ground this track, and everything else in Iris, firmly in the recognisable A Winged Victory For The Sullen sound-world.

The shifting beauty of the sustained chords – the clearest link back to Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie’s previous band Stars Of The Lid – form the background to ‘Gare du Nord Part One’ but they are joined again by more sinister and edgy synth work. I have no idea what the film itself is actually about but, if the soundtrack is anything to go by, then it is not going to make for a cheery night out at the pictures. One of the real successes of the soundtrack is how it manages to simultaneously convey both beauty and unease: it is easy to imagine Iris accompanying impossibly beautiful French people in various stages of psychological turmoil.

It isn’t until ‘Galerie’, three quarters of the way through, that AWVFTS's return to one of the sounds that formed such a characteristic part of the self-titled debut: Dustin O’Halloran’s suspended-in-mid-air-on-gossamer-strands piano chords. This is the track that sounds most typically A Winged Victory For The Sullen: over a beatless haze minor chords ring out and rise slowly upwards. Because this track is atypical of the rest of the album it shows one of the real strengths of Iris: it doesn’t sound like the duo are re-treading either of their previous albums too closely, but it still sounds unmistakeably like them.

One of the real strengths of A Winged Victory for the Sullen since their inception has been the way that they have managed to marry electronics with a full orchestral sound (in this case a 40-piece string orchestra recorded in Budapest) without the seams showing. This soundtrack allows them to play to those strengths whilst also pushing them out of a purely ambient space and into the creation of a work with far more movement and tension than before. Iris is that very rare thing: a soundtrack that can make a superb stand-alone listen.

Tiny Mix Tapes 60

A Winged Victory For The Sullen
Iris

[Erased Tapes; 2017]

Rating: 3/5