• News

• All

Feb 28, 2019 By Christopher Roberts Robert Pattinson

Tindersticks have shared a new song, “Willow,” via a video for the track. The song features actor Robert Pattinson on vocals and is taken from the soundtrack to the upcoming film High Life, which Pattinson stars in. Tindersticks’ frontman Stuart A. Staples has done the score for High Life, which was directed by Claire Denis (Staples has scored various other Denis films in the past). High Life is due out in New York and Los Angeles on April 5 and the soundtrack is due out the same day via Milan and City Slang. The video features images from the film, including Pattinson. Watch it below, followed by the soundtrack’s tracklist and cover art.

A press release describes the movie as such: “In High Life, Monte (Robert Pattinson) and his baby daughter are the last survivors of a damned and dangerous mission to deep space. The crew-death-row inmates led by a doctor (Juliette Binoche) with sinister motives-has vanished. As the mystery of what happened onboard the ship unravels, father and daughter must rely on each other to survive as they hurtle toward the oblivion of a black hole. A staggering and primal film about love and intimacy, suffused with anguished memories of a lost Earth, High Life is a haunting, thrilling achievement from visionary director Claire Denis.”

Staples issued this lengthy statement about his score for the film:

“Most of the music for High Life was made before the filming. The conversation with Claire started maybe as far back as 2012. There were many ideas I wanted to explore and I appreciated the foresight of Claire and the producers in offering me support and encouragement to do this. As well as work with usual collaborators Dan McKinna, Neil Fraser and Earl Harvin, this afforded me purely experimental recording sessions with David Coulter, Thomas Bloch, David Okumu, Julian Siegel, Seb Rochford and the BBC singers. Several long sketches / pieces were created from these sessions that the eventual score was formed from or informed by.

“I approached High Life with the simple idea of creating a sort of random music, existing in a void - like the constellations themselves - a framework that was always hidden from the musician and that they had only minimal or no information to play or react to as we recorded. The first piece completed was ‘The Yellow Light’ for the early Claire Denis / Olafur Eliasson collaborative short film Contact (2014). For this, each instrument / part was played into silence with arbitrary start points creating random movements and relationships when brought together. This theme / way of working runs through the entire making of the score for High life. Musicians generally worked ‘in the darkness’.

For ‘the void’ itself a series of hums and drones were created in the studio - various instruments played, or feeding back, or with their notes Sello taped down, to make the studio space resonate in different keys. These stereo recordings were alive, working and changing within themselves - this approach was informed by my experiences creating the sound installation ‘Ypres’ at the In Flanders Fields WW1 museum in Belgium and the adventure of making this 12th century hall vibrate and resonate with its evolving orchestral score.

“And then there was ‘Willow,’ a seed of a song shared by myself and Dan Mckinna that eventually grew to be the conclusion of the High Life with Robert Pattinson, the lead actor, singing the song in character to his daughter Willow, a theme that runs through the film.

“For the flashback sequences on earth I spent many consecutive nights recording in the rain waiting for the right intensity of heavy drops falling from the guttering of my studio onto the carefully positioned paella pans below.

“I felt the score should be intimate and hypnotic. Music made of hands and breath-acoustic instruments, electric guitars, fingertips.”

Staples released a solo album, Arrhythmia, last year via City Slang. Tindersticks’ last album, The Waiting Room, was released in 2016 via City Slang.

Music for Claire Denis’ High Life Tracklist:

1. The Garden
2. Willow Lullaby
3. System Report
4. High Life Main Title
5. River Flashback
6. Fluids
7. The Fuck Box
8. Bad Genes Revolution
9. Radiation
10. Rape of Boyse
11. Insemination
12. Grow Baby, Grow
13. Boyse’s Death
14. The Dog Ship
15. Monte and Willow
16. The Yellow Light
17. The Black Hole (excerpt)
18. Willow (performed by Tindersticks feat. Robert Pattinson)

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.