STOPMOTION - AN EXPANDED, ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK
Lola de la Mata - STOPMOTION (an expanded) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) fully remastered by Andrew Larrabee of Howling House Studio.
Limited Edition of 150 copies,
3 different artworks, each limited to 50 copies.
STOPMOTION, Lola’s first original motion picture soundtrack, marks a striking collaboration with award-winning director Robert Morgan (Bobby Yeah, The Cat with Hands).
Lola’s soundtrack emerges from a microscopic world made vast, with acoustic sources capturing the very materiality of the instruments and their handling, keeping sounds naked and up front. A feeling of growing unease held tensely in close miked acoustic recorded actions - fingers gliding over fingerboards, catching on the varnished wood – leaving nowhere to hide.
Assembled from composed parts and improvisations, the score forms a cursed, unstable organic whole, ebbing and flowing, becoming and unbecoming, mirroring Ella’s puppets and the Ash Man as they materialize themselves from their creator’s scarred psyche. This is body music in every sense, a body coming alive, retaining a live performance quality, expanding the ear in its conjuring of radical sounds from classical instrumental juxtapositions, sounds that puncture, slice, growl shudder and creep along both sides of the vinyl.
Lola is heard throughout, playing prepared violin, zither, cymbals, piano, harpsichord and voicing chorales, spectral requiems to scintillate the upper registers, drawing out uncanny melodic passages on 'tethered', 'sentient lull' and 'my body is in my soul'. The guts of the score - 'meat puppets', 'chimera' - feature lead improvisations in pairs, two bass clarinettists (Ausiàs Garrigòs Morant (Riot Ensemble, Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra) and Raymond Brien, and two double bassists Elena Marigómez Arranz and Gwendolyn Reed, London Contemporary Orchestra) exploring the place of the body, the weight of colours and material textures in Morgan’s haunted film, summoning images of soil crawling with hostile presences, mortician’s wax, rotting flesh and shrieking metal armatures.
For a fleeting moment, shimmering copse echoes the world of STOPMOTION one last time before side B comes to a close with 'In Heaven' (Lady in the Radiator), a cover of David Lynch’s haunting composition from 'Eraserhead'. A primal influence on Robert Morgan, Lynch also played a primary role in Lola’s own artistic awakening almost ten years ago. It was there, in dark velvet rooms, during afterhours Lynch marathons when she worked at Curzon Cinemas in London, that her ear and hunger for oblique sounds awoke.