Saxophonist-turned-voice of Hell: Colin Stetson

A perfect storm is coming out on January 24, 2020. Director Richard Stanley's Color Out Of Space is an adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft classic of the same name, starring Nicolas Cage and, maybe the best part, it's scored by Colin Stetson, and it sounds insane:

Aesthetically, it looks to be a spiritual successor of Nicolas Cage's other recent horror film, Mandy (doom-metal-inspired score provided by the late, great Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson).

Color Out Of Space has had some luke warm early reviews, but I'll be there willy nilly to check it out and report back. I'm not going to NOT like listening to a crazy wall of batshit sound for 2 hours. Plus a guaranteed-to-be-overshot Nick Cage performance. It will be fun contrasting it with his work on Hereditary, which blew my mind. This sneak preview track "Contact" is hugely promising.

I first came across Mr. Stetson just exploring music on spotify, coming across this beautiful album by Stetson and Arcade Fire's Sarah Neufeld.

Super moody, organic (non-electronic) minimalist music. The album explores lots of different feels, all of it lovely.

Exploring his earlier releases revealed adventures in droning saxophone-driven soundscapes. Stetson has taken the saxophone and pushed it's limits of timbre, using it as a sound source as much if not more so than an instrument. The way a synthesizer uses an oscillator as a sound source and sculpts it into something else.

In a lot of respects, he is in company with my other favorite film composer of the moment, cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir (see Chernobyl and Joker), who pushes her instrument to new horizons of possibility.

But there's a special tact to Stetson's style as a film composer, at least in the hands of Hereditary director Ari Aster (who also destroyed us with Midsommar in 2019 with a phenomenal soundtrack from Haxan Cloak aka Bobby Krlic).

The aggressively big, triumphant tones of the sound track in the final scenes of Hereditary make it an absolute landmark for me as a film composer and movie lover. It's just so backwards and counter-intuitive to have such a rising, triumphant melody as the fucked-upedness of the film reaches it's climax. It's completely inspired and inspiring, and one of my absolute favorite moments of music in film.